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Pri 

LIFE 



OF 



ROBERT BURNS. » 



BY 

THOMAS CARLYLE. 

'I 



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I 



''lad met 



LIFE OF BURNS. 



PART FIRST. 



Egbert Burns, the national bard of Scotland, was bom on the 25tli 
y^ of January, 1759, in a clay-built cottage about two miles south of the 
town of Ayr. He was the eldest son of William Burnes, or Burness,. 
who, at the period of Robert's birth, was gardener and oyerseer to a 7i#«^ 
gentleman of small^state ; but resided on a few acres of land which 
he had on lease from another person. The fath^\vas a man of strict 
religious principles, and also distinguished for that penetration and 
knowledge of mankind which was afterv/ards so conspicuous in his 
son. The mother of the poet was likewise a very sagacious woman, 
and possessed an inexhaustible store of ballads and legendary tales, 
with which she nourished the infant imagination of him wdiose owu 
productions were destined to excel them all. 

These worthy individuals labored diligently for the support of an 
increasing family , nor in the midst of harassing struggles did they 
neglect the mental improvement of their offspring — a characteristic 
of Scottish parents, even under the most depressing circumstances. 
In his sixth year, Robert was put under the tuition of one Campbell, 
and subsequently under Mr John Murdoch, a very faithful and 
. pains-taking teacher. With this individual he remained for a few 
] years, and was accurately instructed in the first principles of com- 
position. The poet and his brother Gilbert were the aptest pupils in 
^ the school, and were generally at the head of the class. Mr. Mur 
doch, in afterwards recording the impressions which the two brothers 
made on him, says: 'Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a 
more lively imagination, and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I 
attempted to teach them a little church music. Here they were left \ 
far behind by all the rest of the school. Robert's ear, in particular, I 
was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable It was long before I 
juld get them to distinguish one tune from another. Robert's coun • 
^_^enance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious, contempla- 
' tive, and thoughtful mind. Gilbert's face said. Mirth, irith thee I 
mean, to live ; and certainly, if any person who knew the two boys 
had been asked which of them was the most likely to court the muses, 
he would never have guessed that Bohcrt had a propensity of that 
kind/' 



LIFE OF BURNS. 

Besides the tuition of Mr. Murdocli, Bums received instrnctiona 
from his father in writing and arithmetic. Under their joint ciire, 
he made rapid progress, and was remarkable for the ease with which 
he committed devotional poetry to memory. The following extract 
from his letter i-o Dr. Moore, in 1787, is interesting, from the light 
which it thi*ows upon his progress as a scholar, and on the formation 
of his cliaracter as a poet : — "At those years," says he, *' I was by no 

^ means a favor! t-e with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a reten • 
live memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an 

J enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a 
child, lliough it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an 
excellent scholar ; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I 
was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In my infant and 
lK)yish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the 
family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. 
She had, I suppose, the largest c-ollection in the country of tales and 
songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, 
spunkies, kelpies, elf candles, dead- lights, wraiths, apparitions, can- 
trips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This 
cultivated the latent seeds of poetry ; but had so strong an effect upon 
my imaghiation, that to tliis hour, in my nocturnal nunbles, I some 
times keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places ; and though nobody 
can be more skeptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes an 
effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors. The earliest com- 
position that I recollect taldng pleasure in, was, The Vision ofMirza, 
and a hjinn of Addison's, beginning, ' How are t?ty serccmts hleU, O 
Lord ! " I particularly remember one half stanza, which was music 
to my boyish ear ; 

Tor tiioudi on dreadful wliirls we hung 
High on the broken wave.' 

I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my 
school books. The first two books I ever read in private, and which 
gave me more j>leasure than any two books I ever read since, were. 
The Life of Hannibal andThe History of Sir WiUiam Wallace. Han 
nibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in rap- 
f tures up and do^vn after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish 
\ myself tall enough to be a soldier ; while the story of Wallace poured 
a tide of Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along therp. 
till the tiood gates of life shut in eternal rest. " 

Mr. Murdoch's removal from Mount Oliphant deprived Bums of i. 
instmctions ; but they were still continued by the father of the bard. 
Aljout the age of fourteen, he was sent to school every alternate week 
for the improvement of his writing. In the mean while, he was 
busily employed upon the operations of the farm , and, at the age of 
jBft^en, was considered as the principal laborer upon it. About a year 



4 LIFE OF BUKNS. 

to his father without a sixpence. During his stay at Irvine he had met 
with Ferguson's poems. This circumstance was of some importance 
to Burns, for it roused his poetic powers from the torpor into which 
ther had fallen, and in a great measure finally determined the Scottish 
character of his poetry. He here also contracted some friendships, 
which he himself says did him mischief ; and, by his brother (p^ilbert's 
account, from this date there was a serious change in his conduct. 
The venerable and excellent parent of the poet died soon after his 
son's return. The support of the family now devolving upon Burns, 

^ in conjunction with his brother he took a sub lease of the farm of 
Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline. The four years which he re- 
sided upon this farm were the most important of his life. It was 
here he felt that nature had designed him for a poet ; and here, 
accordingly, his genius began to develop its energies in those strains 
wliich will make his name familiar to all future times, the admiration 
of every civilized country, and the glory and boast of his own. 

The vigor of Burns's understanding, and the keenness of his wit, 
as displayed more particularly at masonic meetings and debating 
clubs, of which he formed one at Mauchline, began to spread his 
fame as a man of uncommon endowments. He nov/ could number as 
his acquaintance several clergymen, and also some gentlemen of sub- 
stance ; amongst whom was Mr. Gavin Hamilton, writer in Mauch- 
line, one of his earliest patrons. One circumstance more than any 
other contributed to increase his notoriety. ''Polemical divinity," 
says he to Dr. Moore in 1787, " about this time w^as putting the coun- 
try half mad ; and I, ambitious of shining in conversation -parties on 
Sundays, at funerals, etc., used to puzzle Calvinism with so much 
heat and indiscretion, that I raised a hue-and cry of heresy against 
me, which has not ceased to this hour." The farm which he pos- 
sessed belonged to the Earl of Loudon, but the brothers held it in 
sub-lease from Mr. Hamilton. This gentleman was at open feud 
with one of the ministers at Mauchline, who w^as a rigid Calvinist. 
Mr. Hamilton maintained opposite tenets ; and it is not matter of 
surprise that the young farmer should have espoused his cause, and 
brought all the resources of his genius to bear upon it. The result 
was The Holy Fair, The OrdinaMon, Holy Willie's Prayer, and other 

1[| itires, as much distinguished for their coarse severity and bitterness 

\i 5 for their genius. 
\ The applause v/hich greeted these pieces emboldened the poet, and 

"Encouraged him to proceed. In his life, by his brother Gilbert, a 
very interesting account is given of the occasions which gave rise to 
the XDoems, and the chronological order in which they were i)roduced. 
The exquisite pathos and humor, the strong manly sense, the mas- 
terly command of felicitous language, the graphic power of delineat- 
ing scenery, manners, and incidents, which appear so conspicuously 
in his various poems, could not fail to call forth the admiration of 
those who were favored with a perusal of them. But the clouds of 



LIFE OF BUKXS. 8 

after this lie gained three weeks of respite, which he spent with his 
old tutor, Murdoch, at xiyr, in revising the English grammar, and in 
studying the French language, in which he made uncommon progiess. 
Ere his sixteenth year elapsed, he had considerably extended his 
reading. The vicinity of Mount Oliphant to Ayr afforded him facil- 
ities for gratifying what had now become a passion. Among the 
books vrhicli he had perused were some plays of Shakspeare, Pope, , 
tlie works of Allan Ramsay, and a collection of songs, which consti- * i 
tuted his tade mecum. " I pored over them," says he, '* driving my a 
cart or w^alking to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully ■ 
noticing the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian." 
So early did he evince his attachment to the lyric muse, in which he 
was destined to surpass all who have gone before -or succeeded him. 

At this x^eriod the family removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tar- 
bolton. Some time before, however, he had made his first attempt in 
poetry. It was a song addressed to a rural beauty, about his own 
age, and, though possessing no great merit as a whole, it contains some 
lines and ideas which w^ould have done honor to him at any age. 
After the removal to Lochlea, his literary zeal slackened, for he was 
thus cut off from those accpiaintances whose conversation stimulated 
his powers, and whose kindness supplied him with books. For about 
three years after this period he w^as busily employed upon the farm, 
but at intervals he paid his addresses to the poetic muse, and with no 
common success. The summer of his nineteenth year was spent in 
the study of mensuration, surveying, etc. , at a small sea-port town, 
a good distance from home. He returned to his father's considerably 
improved. '*My I'eading," says he, ** was enlarged with the very im- 
l^ortant addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's works. I had seen 
human nature in a new phasis ; and I engaged several of my school 
fellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This improved 
me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the \vixs 
of Queen Anne's reign, and I pored over them most devoutly ; I kept 
copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison 
between them and the composition of most of my correspondents 
flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that, though I had 
not three farthings* worth of business in the world, yet almost every 
post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad, plodding 
son of day-book and ledger." 

His mind, peculiarly susceptible of tender impressions, was contin- 
ually the slave of some rustic charmer. In the '' heat and whirlwind 
of his love," he generally found relief in poetry, by which, as by a 
safety-valve, his turbulent passions were allov/ed to have vent. He 
formed the resolution of entering the matrimonial state ; but his cir- 
cumscribed means of subsistence as a fanner preventing his taking that 
step, he resolved on becoming a flax -dresser, for which purpose he re- 
moved to the town of Irvine, in 1781 The speculation turned out un- 
successff ul ; for the shop, catching fire, was burnt, and the i)oet returned 



LIFE OF BURNS. 5 

misfortune were gatli^ring darkly above the head of liim who was 
thus giving delight to a large and widening circle of friends. The 
farm of Mossgiel proved a losing concern ; and an amour with Miss 
Jane Armour, afterwards Mrs. Burns, had assumed so serious an 
aspect, that he at first resolved to fly from the scene of his disgrace 
and misery. One trait of his character, however, must be men- 
tioned. Before taking any steps for his departure, he met Miss Ar- 
mour by appointment, and gave into her hands a written acknowledg- 
ment of marriage, which, vv-hen produced by a person in her situation, 
is, according to the Scots' law, to be accepted as legal evidence of an 
irregular marriage having really taken place. This the lady burned, 
at the persuasion ol her father, who was adverse to a marriage ; and 
Burns, thus wounded in the two most powerful fee^mgs of his mind, 
his love and pride, was driven almost to insanity, Jamaica was his 
destination ; but, as he did not possess the money necessary to defray 
the expense of his passage out, he resolved to publish sortie of his 
best poems, in order to raise the requisite sum. These views were 
warmly promoted by some of his more opulent friends ; aud a suffi- 
ciency of subscribers having been procured, one of the finest volumes 
of poems that ever appeared in the world issued fron; the provincial 
press of Kilmarnock. 

It is hardly possible to imagine with what eager admiration and 
delight they were everywhere received. They possessed in an emi- 
nent degree all those qualities which invariably contribute to render 
any literary work quickly and permanently popular. They were 
written in a phraseology of which all the powers were universally 
felt, and which, being at once antique, familiar, and now rarely writ- 
ten, was therefore fitted to serve all the dignified and picturesqufl 
uses of poetry, without making it unintelligible. The imagery and 
the sentiments were at once natural, impressive, and interesting. 
Those topics of satire and scandal in which the rustic delights ; that 
humorous imitation of character, and that witty association of ideas, 
familiar and striking, yet not naturally allied to one another, which 
has force to shake his sides with laughter ; those fancies of supersti- 
tion at which one still wonders and trembles ; those affecting senti- 
ments and images of true religion which are at once dear and awful 
to the heart, were all represented by Burns with the magical power 
of true poetry. Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned 
and ignorant, all were alike surprised and transported. 

In the mean time a few copies of these fascinating poems found 
their way to Edinburgh, and having been read to Dr. Blacklock, ob- 
tained his warmest approbation ; and he advised the author to repair 
to Edinburgh. Burns lost no time in complying with this request ; 
and accordingly, towards the end of the year 1786, he set out for the 
capital, where he was received by Dr. Blacklock with the most flat- 
tering kindness, and introduced to every person of taste among that 
excellent man's friends. Multitudes now vied with each other in 



6 LIFE OF BURNS. 

patronizing liie rustic poet. Those "svlio possessed at once true taste 
and ardent philanthropy were soon united in his praise ; those v/ho 
were disposed to favor any good thing belonging to Scotland, purely 
because it was Scottish, gladly joined the cry ; while those who had 
hearts and unde^-standings to be chai-nied without knoAving v/hy, 
when tliey saw their native customs, manners, and language mado 
the subjects and the materials cf poesy, could not suppress tluit im 
pulse of feeling which struggled to declare itself m favor of Burns. 

Thus did Burns, ere he had been many weeks in Edinburgh, find 
himself the object of universal curiosity, favor, admiration, and fond 
noss. He was sought after, courted with attentions the most respect- 
ful and assiduous, feastea, tiattered, caressed, and treated by all ranks 
as the great boast of his country, whom it was scarcely possible to 
honor and reward in a degree equal to his merits. 

A new edition of his poems was called for, and the public mind 
was directed to the subject by Henry Mackenzie, who dedicated a 
paper in the Lounger to a commendatory notice of the poet. This 
circumstance will ever be remembered to the honor of that polished 
^vriier, not only for the warmth of the eulogy he bestowed, but be- 
cause it was the first printed acknowledgment which had been made 
to the genius of Burns. The copyright was sold to Creech for £100 ; 
but the friends of the poet advised him to forward a subscription. 
The patronage of the Caledonian Hunt, a very influential body, was 
obtained. The list of subscribers rapidly rose to 1,500, many gentle- 
men paying a great deal more than the price of the volume ; and it 
was supposed that the poet derived from the subscription and the sale 
of his copyright a clear profit of at least £700. 

The conversation of Burns, according to the testimony of all the 
eminent men who heai*d him, was even more wonderful than his 
poetry. He aiiected no soft air nor graceful motions of politeness, 
which might have ill accorded with the rustic plainness of his native 
manners. Conscious superiority of mind taught him to associate 
with the great, the learned, and the gay, without being overawed 
into any such bashfulness as might have rendered him confused in 
thought or hesitating in elocution. He possessed withal an extraor- 
dinary share of plain common sense, or mother- wit, which prevented 
him from obtruding upon persons, of whatever rank, with whom he 
was admitted to converse, any of those effusions of vanity, envy, or 
self-conceit in which authors who have lived remote from the general 
practice of life, and Avhose minds have been almost exclusively con- 
fined to contemplate their own studies and their own works, are but 
too prone to indulge. In conversation he displayed a sort of intuitive 
(juickness and rectitude of judgment, upon every subject that arose, 
'i'he sensil)iiity of his heart and the vivacity of his fancy gave a 
rich coloring to whatever opinions he was disposed to advance , and 
his language was thus not less hap])y in conversation than in his 
writings. Hence thase who had mei and conversed with him onc« 
were pleased to meet a«d to converse with him again and again. 



LIFE OF BURNS. 7 

For some time he associated only with the virtuous, the learned, 
and the -svise, and the purity of his morals remained uncontaminated. 
But unfortunately he fell, as others have fallen in similar circum- 
stances. He suffered himself to be surrounded by persons Vy'Iio were 
proud to tell that they had been in company with Burns, and had 
seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He now also began 
to contract something of arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to 
be among his associates what is vulgarly but expressively called ' ' tho 
cock of the company," he could scarcely refrain from indulging in a 
similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in the presence 
of persons who could less patiently endure presumption. 

After remaining some months in the Scottish metropolis, basking 
in the noontide sun of a popularity which, as Dugald Stewart w^ell 
remarks, would have turned any head but his own, he formed a reso 
lution of returning to the shades whence he had emerged, but not 
before he had perambulated the southern border. On the 6th of May, 
1787, he set out on his journey, and, visiting all that appeared inter 
esting on the north of the Tweed, proceeded to Newcastle and other 
places on the English side. He returned in about two months to his 
family at Mauchline ; but in a short period he again set out on an ex 
cursion to the north, where he was most flatteringly received by all 
the great families. On his return to Mossgiel he completed his mar- 
riage with Miss Armour. He then concluded a bargain with !Mr. 
Miller of Dalswinton for a lease of the farm of Elliesland, on advan. 
tageous terms. 

Burns entered on possession of this farm at Whitsunday, 1788. 
He had formerly applied with success for an excise commission, and 
during six weeks of this year he had to attend to the business of that 
profession at Ayr. His life for some time was thus wandeiing and 
unsettled ; and Dr. Currie mentions this as one of his chief misfor- 
tunes. Mrs. Burns came home to him towards the end of the year, 
and the poet was accustomed to say that the happiest period of his 
life was the first winter spent in Elliesland. The neighboring farm 
ers and gentlemen, pleased to obtain for a neighbor the poet by whose 
works they had been delighted, kindly sought his company, and in- 
vited him to their houses. Burns, however, found an inexpressible 
charm in sitting down beside his wife, at his own fireside ; in wan- 
dering over his own grounds ; in once more putting his hand to the 
spade and the plough ; in farming his enclosures and managing his 
cattle. For some months he felt almost all that felicity which fancy 
had taught him to expect in his new situation. He had been for a 
time idle, but his muscles were not yet unbraced for rural toil. He 
DOW seemed to find a joy in being the husband of the mistress of liis 
affections, and in seeing himself the father of children such as prom 
ised to attach him forever to that modest, humble, and domestic life 
n which alone he could hope to be permanently happy. Even his 
-nofagements in the service of excise did not, at iirst, threaten either 
lo o'ontaminate the poet or to ruin the farmer. 



8 LIFE OF BURNS. 

From various causes, tlie fanning speculation did not succeed. 
Indeed, from tlxe time he obtained a situation under government, he 
gradually began to sink the farmer in the exciseman. Occasionally 
he assisted in the rustic occupations of Elliesland, but for the most 
part he v/as engaged in very different pursuits. In his professional 
perambulaions over the moors of Dumfriesshire he had to encounter 
temptations which a mind and temperament like his found it difficult 
to resist. His immortal works had made him universally known and 
tnthusiastically admired ; and accordingly he was a welcome guest 
at every house, from the most princely mansion to the lowest country 
inn. In the latter he was too frequently to be found as the presiding 
genius and master of the orgies. However, he still continued at in- 
tervals to cultivate the muse ; and, besides a variety of other pieces, 
he produced at this period the inimitable poem of Tam O'Shanter. 
Johnson's Miscellany was also indebted to him for the finest of its 
lyrics. One pleasing trait of his character must not be overlooked. 
He superintended the formation of a subscription library in the par- 
ish, and took the whole management of it upon himself. These 
institutions, though common now, were not so at the period of which 
we write ; and it should never be forgotten that Burns was amongst the 
first, if not the very first, of their founders in the rural districts of 
southern Scotland. 

Towards the close of 1791 he finally abandoned his farm ; and, ob- 
taining an appointment to the Dumfries division of excise, he re- 
paired to that town on a salary of £70 per annum. All his principal 
biographers concur in stating that after settling in Dumfries his 
moral career was downwards. Heron, who had some acquaintance 
with the matter, says : ' ' His dissipation became still more deeply 
habitual ; he was here more exposed than in the country to be soli- 
cited to share the revels of the dissolute and the idle ; foolish young 
men flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to 
drink with them, that they might enjoy his vrit. The Caledonia 
Club, too, and the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Hunt, had occasional 
meeti igs in Dumfries after Burns went to reside there ; and the poet 
was of course invited to share their conviviality, and hesitated not to 
accept the invitation. In the intervals between his different fits or 
intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse and horri 
bly afflictive foresight. His Jane behaved with a degree of conjugal 
and maternal tenderness and prudence which made him feel more 
bitterly the evil of his misconduct, although they could not reclaim 
him." 

This is a dark picture — perhaps too dark. The Rev. Mr. Gray, 
who, as the teacher o his son, was intimately acquainted with Burns, 
and had frequent opportunities of judging of his general character 
and deportment, gives a more amiable portrait of the bard. Being 
an eye witness, the testimony of this gentleman must be allowed to 
have some weight. *'The truth is/' says he, "Burns was seldom 



LIFE OF BURNS. 9 

intoxicated. The drunkard soon becomes besotted, and is shunned 
even by the convivial. Had he been so, he could not have ]ong con- 
tinued the idol of every party.'' This is strong reasoning; and ho 
goes on to mention other circumstances which seem to confirm tho 
truth of his position. In balancing these two statements, a juster 
estimate of the moral deportment of Burns may be formed. 

In the year 1792 paity politics ran to a great height in Scotland, and 
the liberal and independent spirit of Burns did certainly betray him 
into some indiscretions. A general opinion prevails, that he so far 
lost the good graces of his superiors by his conduct as to consider all 
prospects of future promotion as hopeless. But this appears not to 
have been the case ; and the fact that ho acted as supervisor before 
his death is a strong proof to the contrary. Of his political verses, 
few have as yet been published. But in these he warmly espoused 
the cause of the Whigs, which kept up the spleen of the other party, 
already sufficiently provoked ; and this may in some measure account 
for the bitterness with which his own character was attacked. 

Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in 
Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unim- 
paired to the last ; it vras there he produced his finest lyrics, and they 
are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind. 
Besides Johnson's Museum, in which he took an interest to the last, 
and to which he contributed most extensively, he formed a connection 
with Mr. George Thomson, of Edinburgh. This gentleman had 
conceived the laudable design of collecting the national melodies of 
Scotland, with accompaniments by the most eminent composers, and 
poetry by the best writers, in addition to those words which were 
originally attached to them. From the multitude of songs which 
Burns wrote, from the year 1792 till the commencement of his illness, 
it is evident that few days could have passed without his producing 
some stanzas for the work. The following passage from his cor- 
respondence, which was also most extensive, proves that his songs 
vrere not hurriedly got up, but composed with the utmost care and 
attention. '' Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, 
such as it is," says he, '* I can never compose for it. My way is this : 
I consider the poetic seniiment correspondent to my idea of the musical 
expression — then choose mv theme — compose one stanza. When that 
is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, 
I walk out— sit down now and then— look out for objects in nature 
round me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my 
fancy and workings of my bosom — liumming every now and then the 
air, with the verses I have framed. When I feel *my muse beginning 
to jade, I retire to the solitary Hveside of my study, and there commit 
my effusions to paper ; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my 
elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my 
pen goe^. Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way." 
This 13 not only interesting for the light which it throws upon his 



10 LIFE OF BURNS. 

method of composition, but it proves tliat conviviality had not as yet 
greater charms for him than the muse. 

From his youth Burns had exhibited ominous symptoms of a radical 
disorder in liis constitution. A palpitation of the heart and a deranf>-e 
ment of the digestive organs were conspicuous. These v/ere, doubt- 
less, increased by his indulgences, which became more frequent as liJ 
drew towards the close of his career. In the autumn of iVdo he losl 
an oniy daughter, which was a severe blow to him. Soon afterwards 
he was seized with a rheumatic fever ; and * ' long the die spun 
doubtful," says he, in a letter to his faithful friend Mrs. Dunlap, 
** until, after many weeks of a sick bed, it seems to have turned up 
life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room." The cloud behind 
which his sun was destined to be eclipsed at noon had begun to darken 
above him. Before he had completely recovered, he had the im- 
prudence to join a festive circle ; and, on his return from it, he 
caught a cold, which brought b?x"k liis trouble upon him v/ith redoubled 
severity. Sea-bathing was had recourse to, but with no ultimate 
success. He lingered until the 21st of July, 1796, when he expired. 
The interest which the death of Burns excited was intense. All 
differences were forgotten , his genius only was thought of. On the 
26th of the same month he was conveyed to the grave, followed by 
about ten thousand individuals of all ranks, many of whom had como 
from distant parts of the country to witness the solemnity. He was 
interred with military honors by the Dumfries volunteers, to which 
body he had belonged. 

Thus, at the age of tiiirty-seven, an age when the mental powers 
of man have scarcely reached their climax, died Robert Burns, one of 
the greatest poets whom his country has produced. It is unnecessary 
to enter into any lengthened analysis of his poetry or character. His 
works are universally known and admired, and criticism has been 
drawn to the dregs upon the subject ; and that, too by the greatest 
masters who have appeared since his death — no mean test of the great 
merits of his writings. He excels equally in touching the heart by 
the exquisiteness of his pathos, and exciting the risible faculties by 
the breadth of his humor. His lyre had many strings, and he had 
equal command over tViem all, striking each, and frequently in 
chords, with the skill and power of a master. That liis satire some- 
times degenerates into coarse invective cannot be denied ; but whcra 
personality is not permitted to interfere, his poems of this description 
may take their place beside anything of the kind which has ever 
been produced, without being disgraced by the comparison. It is 
unnecessary to re echo the praises of his best pieces, as there is no 
epithet of admiration which has not been bestov/ed upon them. 
Those who had best opportunities of judging are of opinion that hia 
works, stamped as th(;y are with the impress of sovereign genius, 
fall short of the powers lie possessed It is therefore to be lamented 
that he undertook no tri'^at work of fiction or invention. Had circum- 



LIFE OF BURNS. 11 

stances permitted, lie would probably have done so ; but his excise 
duties, and mthout doubt his own - follies, prevented him. His 
passions were strong, and his capacity of enjoyment corresponded 
with them. These continually precipitated him into the variety of 
pleasure, where alone they could be gratified , and the reaction 
consequent upon such in -ulgences (for he pos.>sessed the finest dis- 
crimination between right and wrong) threw him into low spirits, to 
which also he was constitutionally liable His mind, being thus 
never for any length of time in an equable tone, could scarcely pursue 
with steady regularity a work of any length His moral aberrations, 
as detailed by some of his biographers, have been exaggerated, as 
already noticed. This has been proved by the testimony of many 
witnesses from whose authority there can be no appeal ; for they had 
the best opportunities of judging. In fine, it may be doubted whether 
he has not, by his writings, exercised a greater power over the minds 
of men and the general system of life than has been exercised by 
any other modern poet. A complete edition of his works, in four 
volumes, 8vo., with a life, was published by Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, 
for the benefit of his family, to whom it realized a handsome sum. 
Editions have been since multiplied beyond number ; and several 
excellent biographies of the poet have been published, particularly 
that by Mr. Lockhart. 



LIFE OF BURNS. '^ 



PART SECOND. 



In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon tliingf 
that a man of genius must, like Butler, *' ask for bread and receive a 
stone ; " for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it 
is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to 
recognize. The inventor of a spinning- jenny is pretty sure of his 
reward in his own day ; but the writer of a true poem, like the 
apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do 
not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there 
is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course 
of nature, might yet have been living ; but his short life ^vas spent 
in toil and penury ; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, mis- 
erable and neglected ; and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over 
his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been reared in 
other places to his fame : the street where he languished in poverty 
is called by his name ; the highest personages in our literature have 
been proud to appear as his commentators and admirers, and here is 
the si:rth narrative of his Life that has been given to the world ! 

Mr. Loekhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt O'j 
sucli a subject ; but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him 
or, at worst, ^dll censure only the performance of his task, not the choice 
of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily 
become either trite or exhausted, and will probably gain rather than 
lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. 
No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet : and this is probably 
true ; but the f^ap^is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's ; 
for it is certain that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that 
are not distant. It i» difficult for men to believe that the man, th(i 
mere man whom they see, nay, perhaps, painfully feel, toiling at 
their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of 
finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance 
of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John a Combe's, had snatched 
an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written ug 
a Life of Shakesp are ! What disoertation should we not have had 

* Carlyle's review of '• Lockhart's Life of Robert Burns." 



LIFE OF BURNS. 13 

— ^not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade and deer- 
steiiing, and the libel and vagrant laws ! and how the Poacher be- 
came a Player ! and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian 
bowcls, and did not push him to extremities ! In like manner, Wv3 
believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his pil- 
grimage, the honorable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen 
of the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the 
Squires and Earls, equully with the Ayr Writers, and the New and 
Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become in\ isi- 
ble in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed 
from Ms juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any true 
standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eigh- 
teenth century, for his country and the world. It will be difficult, 
we say, but still a fair problem for literary historians ; and repeated 
attempts will give us repeated approximations. 

His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no 
means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the 
principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essen- 
tially important thing : their own and the world's true relation 
to their author, and the style in which it became such men to think 
and to speak of such a man. Dr. Carrie loved the poet truiy ; more, 
perhaps, than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself ; yet he 
everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic 
air, as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrant- 
able that he, a man of science, a scholar, and gentleman, should do 
such honor to a rustic. In all this, however, we really admit that 
his fault was not want of lovo, but weakness of faith ; a-d regret that 
the first and kindest of all our poet's biograpliers should not have 
seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker 
offends more deeply in the same kind : and both err alike in present- 
ing us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, 
virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character 
as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a portrait ; but 
gauging the length and breadth of the several features, and jetting 
down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so 
much as this : for v. e are yet to learn by v/.iat arts or instruments tlie 
mind could be so measured and gauged. 

Mr, Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors. 
He uniformly treats Barns as the high and remarkable man the pub- 
lic voice has now pronounced him to be : and in delineating him lie 
has avoidcvl tlie method of separate generalities, and rather sought 
for characreristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for 
aspects which exhibit the whole man as he looked and lived among 
his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives 
more insig..t, we tliink, into the true character of Burns than any 
prior biography; though, being written on the very popular and con- 
densed scheme of an article for ConstMe's Miscellany y it has le,s3 



14 LIFE OF BURNS. 

depth tlian we could have wished and expected from a writer of such 
power, and contains rather more, and more multifarious, quotations 
than belong" of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lock- 
hart's own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct, and nervous, 
that we seldom wish to see it making place for another man's. How- 
ever, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, and anx- 
iously conciliating; compliments and praises are liberally distributed, 
on ail hands, to great and small ; and, as iNlr. Morris Birkbeck ob- 
(Serves of the society in the backwoods of America, *' the courtesies of 
polite life are never lost sight of for a moment." But there are bet- , 
ter things than these in the volume ; and we can safely testify, not 
only that it is easily and j)leasantly read a first time, but may even 
be without difficulty read again. 

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that tlie problem of Burns's 
Biography has yet been adequately solved We do not allude so 
much to deficiency of facts or documents — though of these we are 
still every day receiving some fresh accession — as to the limited and 
imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography Our 
notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant ; but if an 
individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and 
character recorded for public remembrance, we have ahvays been of 
opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward 
springs and relations of his character. How did the world aiid man's 
life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his mind? 
HoAV did coexisting circumstances modify him from without? how 
did he modify these from within ? With what endeavors and what 
efficacy rule over them? with what resistance and what suffering 
sink under them ? In one word, what and how produced was the 
effect of society on him ; what and hov>^ produced was his effect on 
society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any 
individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in 
biography. Fe^v mdividuals, indeed, can deserve such a study ; and 
many lives will be written, and for the gratification of innocent curi- 
osity ought to be written, and read, and forgotten, which are not in 
this sense hiorjrapliics. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these 
few individuals ; and such a study, at least with such a result, he has 
not yet obtained. Our ov/n contributions to it, we are aware, can bo 
but scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good will, and trust 
that they may meet with acceptance from those for whom they are 
intended. 

Burns first came upon the vv'orld as a prodigy ; and was, in that 
character, entertained by it in the usual fashion, with loud, vague, 
tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect ; till 
liis early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm 
for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and 
much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is 
true, the "nine days" have long since elapsed ; and the very con- 



LIFE OF BUKNS. 15 

tinuauce of this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. 
Accordhigly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, ho 
has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic 
merits, and may now be well nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he 
appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most 
considerable British msn of the eighteenth century. Let it not 
be ol)jeoted that he did little ; he did much, if we consider where and 
how. If the work performed was small, we must remember that ho 
had his very materials to discover ; for the metal he worked in lay 
hid under the desert, where no eye but his had guessed its existence ; 
and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct 
the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscu- 
rity, without help, without instruction, without model, or with 
models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it 
were, in the midst of a boundless ai^senal and magazine, filled with 
all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to de- 
vise from the earliest time ; and he works, accordingly, with a 
strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is Ms state who 
stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must 
be stormed, or remain forever shut against him ? His means are the 
commonest and rudest ; the mere v/ork done is no measure of his 
strength. A dwarf behind his steam engine may remove mountains ; 
but no dwarf will hew them down with the pick-axe ; and he must 
be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an 
age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the 
most advantageous, v/here his mind, if it accomplished aught, must 
accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of pen- 
ury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no 
furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and 
the rh}Tnes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, ho 
sinks not under all these impediments. Through the fogs and dark- 
ness of that obscure region, his eagle eye discerns the true relations 
of the world and human life ; he grows into intellectual strength, 
and trains himself into intellectual exx^ertness. Impelled by tho 
irrepressible movement of his inward spirit, he struggles forward 
into the general view, and ^\'itli haughty modesty lays down before us, 
as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced im- 
perishable. x\dd to all this, that his darksome, drudging childhood 
and youth was by far tJie kindliest era of his whole life, and that ho 
died in his thirty-seventh year ; and then ask if it be strange that 
his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that liis genius at- 
tained no mastery in its art? Alas, his sun shone as through a tropi- 
cal tornado ; and the pale shadow of death eclipsed it at noon I 
Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen 
in clear azure splendor, enlig"htening the world But some beams 
from it did, by fits, pierce through ; and it tinted those clouds with 



16 LIFE OF BURNS. 

rainbow and orient colors into a glory and stern grandeur, wliicli men 
silently gazed on with wonder and tears. 

We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposition rather than 
admiration that our readers require of us here ; and yet to avoid somc« 
tendency to that side is no e'c\:sy matter. ^Ye love Burns, and wo 
pity him ; and love and pity are pr>.ne to magnify. Criticism, it is 
sometimes thought, should be a cold business ; we are not so sure of 
this ; but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively 
that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not 
chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and alfects us. He 
was often advised to write a tragedy : time and means were not lent 
him for this ; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the 
deepest. We question whether the worli has since witnessed so 
utterly sad a scene ; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with 
Sir Hudson Lowe, an i perish on his rock, ' ' amid the melancholy 
main," presented to the reflecting mind such a " spectacle of pity and 
fear" as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater 
soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base entangle- 
ments, which coiled closer and closer round him, till oiTly death 
opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a race with whom the world 
could well dispense ; nor can tlie hard intellect, the unsympathizing 
loftiness, and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons inspire us 
in general with any affection ; at best it may excite amazement ; and 
their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sad- 
ness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some 
eflHuence of Wisdom, some tone of the *' Eternal Melodies," is the 
most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generation : we see in 
him a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; 
his life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn his death, as that of a 
benefactor who loved and taught us. 

Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed on us in Hobert 
Burns ; but with queen-like indifference she cast it from her hand, like 
a thing of no moment, and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle 
bauble, before we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was given 
the power of making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely 
guiding his own was not given. Destiny — for so in our ignorance 
we must speak — his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 
him ; and that spirit, which might have soared could it but have 
walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious facult.es trodden under 
foot in the blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever hav- 
ing lived. And so kind and warm a soul ! so full of inborn riches, 
of love to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out in 
sympathy over universal Nature, and in her bleakest provinces dis- 
cerns a beauty and a meaning! The '* Daisy " falls not unheeded 
under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that * ' wee, cowering, 
timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its provident pains, to *' thole 
the sleety dribble and cranreuch cauld." The "hoar visage" of 



LIFE OF BURNS. 17 

Winter delights him : he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fond- 
ness in these scenes of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tem- 
pest becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the sounding 
woods, for ''it raises his thoughts to Ilim tJiat icalketh on tlte icings 
of the wind/' A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the 
sound it yields will be music ! But observe him chiefly as he min- 
gles with his brother men. What warm, all-comprehending fellow^ 
feeling, what trustful, boundless love, what generous exaggeration 
of the object loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are 
no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes 
as the paragons of Eartii. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not 
seen by him in any Arcidian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, 
in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him ; 
Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage ; the 
simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw 
roof are dear and venerable to his heart ; and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own soul ; and 
they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a 
beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just 
self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; yet it is a 
noble pride, for defence, not for offence — no cold, suspicious feeling, 
but a frank and social one. The peasant Poet bears himself, we might 
say, like a King in exile ; he is cast among the low, and feels himself 
equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, that none may be dis- 
puted to him. The forward he can repel, the sux)ercilious he can 
subdue , pretensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him ; 
there is a fire in that dark eye under which the * ' insolence of conde- 
scension " cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he 
forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And 
yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he wanders not apart 
from them, but mixes warmly in their interests ; nay, throws himself 
into their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. It is 
moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still 
seeks relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the unwor- 
thy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knovv's 
only the name of friendship. And yet he was " quick to learn ; '' a 
man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no con- 
cealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of 
accomplished deceivers ; but there was a generous credulity in his 
Heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among us; ''a soul 
like an ^olian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed 
through them, changed itself into articulate melody." And this was 
hi for v/iiom the world found no fitter business than quarrejling with 
smugglers and \^nLners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and 
gauging ale-barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrow- 
fully wasted ; and a hundred years may pass on before another such 
is given us to waste. 



18 I.IFE OF BURNS. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has l^ft, seem to us, as 
we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what wajj 
in him ; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show 
itself complete, that wanted all things for completeness — culture, lei- 
sure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with 
scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, poured forth with 
little premeditation, expressing, by such means as offered, the pas- 
sion, opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance was it 
permitted him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of 
his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his 
genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments 
would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there is 
something in these poems, marred and defective as they are, which 
forbids the mpst fastidious student of poetry to pass thtm by. Some 
sort of enduring quality they must have ; for, after fifty years of the 
wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read ; 
nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more extensively ; 
and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom 
transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down 
to the most hard, unlettered, and truly natural class, who read Uttle, 
and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. 
The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity — which extends, 
in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions 
where the English tongue is spoken — are well worth inquiring into. 
After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in 
these works. What is that excellence ? 

To answer this question ^^ill not lead us far. The excellence of 
Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose ; but, 
at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized : his Sincerity ^ his 
Indisputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys ; no 
hollow fantastic sentimentalities ; no wire-drawn refinings, either in 
thought or feeling : the passion that is traced before us has glowed in 
a living heart ; the opinion he utters has risen in his own understand- 
ing, and been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hear- 
say, but from Eight and experience ; it is the scenes he has lived and 
labored amidst that he describes : those scenes, rude and humble as 
they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, 
and definite resolves ; and he speaks forth what is in him, not from 
any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full 
to be silent. He speaks it, too, with such melody and modulation as 
he can ; ''in homely rustic jingle ;" but it is his own, and genuine. 
This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them : let 
him who would move and convince others be first moved and con- 
vinced himself. Horace's rule. Si vis 7ne flere, is applicable in a wider 
sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we miglit 
say : Be true if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth 
with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condi- 



LIFE OF BURNS. 19 

tion of his own lieart, and other men, so strangely are we all knit 
together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In 
culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below 
him ; bnt in either case his words, if they are earnest and sincere, 
will find some response within us ; for in spite of all casual varieties 
ill outward rank, or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart 
of man to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one which Burns had 
little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy enough ; but 
the practical appliance is not easy — is, indeed, the fundamental diffi- 
cu.lty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in 
the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate 
the true from the false, a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, 
and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a 
writer. With either, or, as more commonly happens, ^^dth both of 
these deficiencies, combine a love of distinction, a wish to be original, 
which is seldom wanting, and v/e have Affectation, the bane of litera- 
ture, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How" often does the one 
and the other front us, in poetry, as m life ! Great poets themselves 
are not always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort 
and degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong 
effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow 
of success, and he who has much to unfold will sometimes unfold it 
imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man ; yet if we 
examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from 
faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true. He 
refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar 
strong waters — stimulating, indeed, to the taste, but soon ending in 
dislike or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, w^e would ask, 
real men— we mean poetically consistent and conceivable men ? Do 
not these characters, does not the character of their author, which 
more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on 
for the occasion — no natural or possible mode of being, but something 
intended to look much grander than nature ? Surely, all these siorm- 
ful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody 
desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other 
Hulpluirous humors, is more like the brawling of a player in some 
paltry tragedy, wliich is to last three hours, than the bearing of a 
man in the bushiess of life, which is to last tiireescore and ten years. 
To our minds, there is a taint of this sort — something which we 
should call theatrical, false and affected — in every one of these other- 
wise powerf al pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter parts 
of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work he ever wrot« ; 
the only work where he showed himself, in any mef.su re, as he was, 
and seemed so intent on his subject as, for moments, to forget him- 
t3elf. Yet Byron hated this vice~we believe, heartily detested it ; 
nay, he had declared formal war against it in words. * So difficult is 



20 ^ LIFE OP BURNS. 

it even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, whicli 
might seem the simplest of all : to reoA its own consciousness without 
inistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful ! We recollect no 
poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and 
abides with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. He 
is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes and liis 
failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, 
true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be 
a great virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary 
as well as moral. 

It is necessary, however, to mention that it is to the poetry of 
Burns that we now allude ; to those writings which he had time to 
meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp his critical 
feeling or obstruct his endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, 
and other fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this 
praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style, 
but, on the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and 
twisted — a certain high-flown, inllated tone, the stilting emphasis of 
which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even 
his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether un- 
affected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes premeditate the 
sheerest bombast ? But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, 
it is but fair to state that he had two excu.ses. The first was his 
comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for the most part 
he writes with singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of 
English prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master of it, we mean, 
in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These 
Letters strilve us as the effort of a man to express something which 
he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier ex- 
cuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank. His 
correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never 
accurately ascertained ; whom, therefore, he is either forearming 
himself against, or else unconsciously iiattering, by adopting the style 
he thinks will x>lease them, xit all events, we should remember tliat 
these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. 
Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends 
and on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, 
sometimes even beautiful. His Letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly 
excellent. 

But we return to his poetry. In addition to its sincerity, it has 
another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or perliaps a 
means, of the foregoing. It displays itself in his choice of subjects, 
or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power he has ot 
making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary 
man, is forever seeking, in external circumstances, the help which 
can be found only in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, 
he discerns no form or romelinoss : home is not poetical, but prosaic ; 



LIFE OF BURNS. 21 

'it is in some past, distant, conventional world, tliat poetry resides for 
him ; were lie there and not here, were he thus and not so,, it would 
be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored 
novels and iron-mailed epics, with their locality not on the Earth, but 
somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and 
our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper- 
colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures 
from tlie heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands sv\'arm 
in our poetry. Peace be with them ! But yet, as a great moralist 
proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain 
preach to the poets, **a sermon on the duty of staying at home." 
Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for 
them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it is better 
or nobler than our own, than simply because it is different ; and even 
this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own 
age, one day, be an ancient one ; and have as quaint a costume as the 
rest ; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with 
them, in respect of quaintness ? Does Homer interest us now, because 
he wrote of what passed out of his native Greece, and two centuries 
before he was born ; or because he wrote of what passed in God's 
world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centur- 
ies ? Let our poets look to this ; is their feeling really finer, truer, 
and their vision deeper than that of other men ? they have nothing to 
fear, even from the humblest object ; is it not so? — they have nothing 
to hope, but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a 
subject ; the elements of his art are in him and around him on every 
hand ; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but 
under it and within it ; nay, he is a poet precisely because he can di:;- 
cern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world 
around him, the poet is in his place ; for here too is man's ( xistence, 
with its infinite longings and small acquirin;T;'S ; its ever-thwarted, 
ever-renevv'^ed endeavors ; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and 
hopes that wander through Eternity ; and all the mystery of bright- 
ness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, 
since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy 
in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a bed of death ? 
And are vrooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be Comedy no 
longer ? Or are men suddenly grown v/ise, that Laughter must no 
longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce ? Man's life and 
nature is as it vras, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have 
an eye to rei^d these th^'iigs, and a heart to understand them, or they 
come and pass away before him in vain. He is a rates, a seer ; a gift 
of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which 
another cannot equally decipher ? tlien he is no poet, and Delphi itself 
will not make him one. 

In this respect Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet. 



22 LIFE OF BURNS. 

better manifests liis capability, better proves the trutb of Ins genius, 
than if he had, by his own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press 
^oing to the end of his literarv course. Ho shows himself at least a 
poet of Nature's own making ; and Nature, after all, is still the grand 
agent in making poets. We often hear of this raid the other external 
Cvondiiion being rev^iiisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is 
a certain sort of training ; he must ha.ve studied certain things — • 
studied, for instance, ''the elder dramatists" — and so learned a poetic 
language ; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other 
times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a 
confidential footing with the higher classes ; because, above all other 
things, he must see tlie world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend 
this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but an eye to see it 
Avith. Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But happily 
every poet is born in the world, and sees it, with or against his will, 
every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of 
man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's 
destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities and crowded 
saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. 
Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues and all human vices — 
the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther — lie written, in 
stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom 
that has practised honest self-examination ? Truly, this same world 
may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as 
it ever came to light in Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant 
to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should have been horn two centu- 
ries ago, inasmuch as poetry soon after that date vanished from the 
earth, and became no longer attainable by men ! Such cobAveb spec- 
ulations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature ; but 
they obstruct not the growth of any plant there : the Shakspeare or the 
Burns, unconsciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes" 
them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he rppear ? 
Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his marble 
was lying, and what falnic lie could rear from it ? It is not the ma- 
terial, but the workman, that is wanting. It is not the dark place 
that hinders, btit the dim eye, A Scottish peasant's life was the 
meanest and rudest of all lives till Burns became a poet in it, and a 
poet of it — found it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. A 
thousand battle-fields remain unsung, but the Wounded Hare has not 
perished without its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us 
from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Halloween 
liad passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the era of 
the Druids ; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the mat-e- 
rlals of a Scottish idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any Council of 
Trent or Roman Jubilee; but, nevertheless, Syperstitiop. and Hypoc 
risy and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man's hand it 



LIFE OF liUKNS. 23 

became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life. I^et but 
the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him w^here and how you 
will, and true poetry will not be wanting. 

Independently of the essential gif o of poetic feeling, as wo have 
now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling w^orth per- 
"ades whatever Burns has written — a virtue, as of green fields and 
mountain breezes, dwells iu his ijoetry ; it is redelent of natural life 
and hardy, natural men. There is a decisive strength in him, and 
yet a sweet native gracefulness ; he is tender, and he is vehement, 
yet without constraint or too visible effort ; he melta the heart, or in- 
flames it, with a power wiiich seems habitual and familiar to him. 
We see iii him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with 
the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. Tears 
lie in him, and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drops of the 
summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of 
human feeling : the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the 
joyful, are welcome in their turns to his " lightly moved and all-con- 
ceiving spirit." And observe with what a j^rompt and eager force he 
grasps his subject, be it wdiat it may ! Hoav he fixes, as it were, tli3 
full image of the matter in his eye — full and clear in every lineament 
— and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a thousand acci- 
dents and superficial circumstances, no one of wdiich misleads him ! 
Is it of reason — some truth to be discovered ? No sophistry, no vain 
surface-logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces 
through into the marrow of the question, and speaks his verdict with 
an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description — some 
visual object to be represented ? No poet of any age or nation is more 
graphic than Burns : the characteristic features disclose themselves 
to him at a glance ; three lines from his hand, and we have a like- 
ness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward, me- 
tre, so clear and definite a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman working 
with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more ex- 
press! v^e or exact. 

This clearness of sight we may call the foundation of all talent ; 
for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall w^e know how to place 
or prize it, in our understanding, our imagination, our affections? 
Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence, but capable of 
being united indifferently with the strongest or with ordinary powers. 
Homer surpasses all men in this quality ; but, strangely enough, at 
no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, 
in truth, to wiiat is called a lively mind, and giv^es no sure indication 
of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all tlie 
three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity ; 
their descriptions are detailed, ample, and lovingly exact ; Homer's 
fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident ; but Defoe 
and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
by the clearnesri than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of 



2i LIFE OF BURNS. 

the strerxgtli, the piercing empliasis ^vitli which he thought, his em^ 
phasis of expression may give an humble but the readiest proof. 
Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his — words more memorable, 
novv^ by their burning vehemence, nov/ by their cool vigor and laconic 
pith? A single phrase depicts a wliole subject, a whole scene. Our 
Scottish foiefathers in the battle-field struggled forward, he says, 
''red-icdt shod ;" giving, in this one word, a full vision of horror and 
carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art J 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this 
vigor of his strictly intellectua.1 perceptions. A resolute force is ever 
visible in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. Professor 
Stewart says of him, with some surprise : ' ' All the faculties of 
Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous ; and his 
predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic 
and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to 
that species of composition. From his conversation I should have 
pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition 
he had chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we mistake not, 
is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 
Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole 
consists in extreme sensibility and a certain vague pervading tune- 
fulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be 
superadded to the rest or disjoined from them ; but rather the 
result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the 
gifts, that exist in the Poet, are those that exist, with more or less 
development, in every liuman soul : the imagination which shudders 
at the Hell of Dante is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which 
called that picture into being. Hov/ does the poet speak to all men 
with power but by being still more a man than they ? Shakspeare, 
it has been well observed, in the planning and completing of Ins 
tragedies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, which 
might have governed states or indited a Novum Organum. What 
Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have less means 
of judgment : for it dwelt among Vne humblest objects, never saw 
philosophy, and never rose, except for short intervals, into the region 
of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication remains for us in 
his works : we discern the brawny movement cf a gigantic though 
untutored strength, and can understand how, in conversation, his 
quick, sure insight into men and things may, as much as aught else 
about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as 
well as strong The more delicate relation of things could not well 
liave escaped^ his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. 
The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all- 
sufliicient ; nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the 
most certainly elude it. ' or this logic works by words, and **%the 
highest," it has been said, " cannot be expressed in words." We are 



LIFE OF BURNS. 25 

not without tokens of an openness for tins higlier truth also, of a 
keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. 
Stewart, it will be remembered, *' wonders," in the passage above 
quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the ' ' doc- 
trine of association." We rather think that far subtiler things than 
the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to him. 
Here, for instance : 

"We know nothing," thus writes he, *'or next to nothing, of the 
structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming ca- 
prices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this 
thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes 
no extraordinary impression. I have some favorite flowers in spring, 
among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, 
the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that 
I view and hr.ng over with particular delight. I never hear the loud 
solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing 
cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without 
feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or 
poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing ? Are 
we a piece of machinery, which, like the ^■Eolian harp, passive, takes 
the impression of the passing accident, or do these workings argue 
something within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial 
to such proofs of those awful and important realities : a God that 
made all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world 
of weal or woe beyond death and the grave." 

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as some- 
thing different from general force and fineness of nature, as some- 
thing partly independent of them. The necessities of language 
probably require this ; but in truth these qualities are not distinct 
and independent : except in special cases, and from special causes, 
they ever go together. A man of strong understanding is generally 
a man of strong character ; neither is delicacy in the one kind often 
divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant 
that in the poetry of Burns, keenness of insight keeps pace with 
keenness of feeling ; that his light is not more pervading than his 
warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper ; with passions 
not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and 
great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is Love towards all 
Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and 
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a true old 
saying that " love furthers knowledge : " but, above all, it is the living 
essence of that knowledge v/hich makes poets ; the first principle of 
its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his gen^ 
erous, all-embracing I^ove, we have spoken already, as of the grand 
distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life 
and in his Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. Not man 
only, but all that environs man in the material and moral universt^, 

A.B.~4 



26 LIFE OF BURNS, 

is lovely in his sight; ''the hoary hawthorn," the ''troop of gray 
plover," the "solitary curlew," are all dear to him — all live in this 
Earth aloug with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brother- 
hood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom of 
personal misery, brooding over the wintry desolation without him 
and within him, he thinks of the "ourie cattle" and " silly sheep/' 
jmd their suiferings in the pitiless storm ! 

" I thought m9 on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war ; 
Or thro' the drift, deepl airing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 

Hk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry month o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing. 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee ?" 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its " ragged roof andchinky wall/' 
has a heart to pity even these ! This is worth several homilies on 
Mercy ; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in 
sympathy ; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; nothing 
that has existence can be indifferent to him. The very devil he can- 
not hate with right orthodoxy ! 

" But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 

O wad ye tak a thought and men' I 

Ye 'aiblins might—I ainna ken- 
Still hae a stake ; 

I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake !" 

He did noj know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with 
him. " ' He is the father of curses and lies,' said Dr. Slop ; ' and ia 
cursed and damned already.' — ' I am sony for it,' quoth my uncle 
Toby I" — " A poet without Love were a physical and metaphysical 
impossibility. ' " 

Why should we spealv of Scots, wha liac 2H' Wallace hied ; since al] 
know it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects ? This dithy ram- 
ble was composed on horseback ; in riding in the middle of tempests, 
over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, 
observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak — judiciously enough— 
for a man composing Bruce' s Address might be unsaf<^ to trifle with. 
Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through 
the soul of Burns ; but to the external ear, it should be sung with the 
throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart 
of a Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war- 
ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen. 

Another wild, stormful song, that dwells in our ear and mind with 






LIFE OF BURNS. 27 

a strange tenacity, is Macp]iei'son\s FavfAcelL Perhaps there is some- 
thing in the tradition itself that co-operates. For was not this grim 
Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, that *' lived a life of sturt and 
strife, and died by treacherie," was not he too one of the Nimrods and 
Napoleons of the earth, in the arena ol' his own remote, misty glens, for 
want of a clef.rer and wider one? Nay, was there not a touch of 
grace given him ? A fibre of love and softness, of poeiry itself, must 
have lived in his savage heart : for he composed that air the night 
before his execution ; on the wdngs of that poor melody, his better 
soul vroald soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and 
despair, vv^hich, like an avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! 
Rere, ulso, as at Thebes and the Pelops' line, was material Fato 
matched against man's Freewill ; matched in bitterest though obscure 
duel ; and the ethereal soul sunk not, even in its bliudness, without 
a cry which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have 
given words to such a soul — words that we never listen to without a 
strange half -barbarous, half -poetic fellow-feeling ? 

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly ^ 
■ Sae dauhiingly gaed he; 
He iplaifd a spring, and danced it round. 
Below the gallows tree. 

Under a lighter aud thinner disguise, the same principle of Love, 
which we have recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of 
all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humor. 
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth 
rolls through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, and stoops to the 
low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. \Ve speak not of his 
bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature ; for this is Drollery 
rather than Humor : but a much tenderer sportf ulness dwells in him ; 
and comes forth, here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches ; 
as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmefs Mare, or in his Elegy 
on Poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his happ.est effort of 
this kind. In these pieces there are traits of a Humor as fine as that 
of Sterne ; yet altogether different, original, peculiar — the Humor of 
Burns. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred 
qualities of Burns's poetry, much more might be said ; but now, with 
these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of 
our subject. To speak of his individual writings adequately and 
with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already 
hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical 
language, deserving the name of Poems ; they are rhymed eloquence, 
rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, 
aerial, poetical. Tarn O'Shanter itself, whieh enjoys so high a favor, 
does not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last cate- 
gory. It is not so much a poem as a i)iece of sparkling rhetoric , the 



28 LIFE OF BURXS. 

heart and "body of the story still lies hard aud dead. He has not 
gone back, much less carried us hack, into that dark, earnest, 
wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took 
its rise ; he does not attempt, bv any new modelling of his su- 
pernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of 
iiuman nature, which once responded to such things ; and which 
lives in us too, and will forever live, though silent, or vibrat- 
ing with far other notes, and to far different issues. Our Ger- 
man readers will understand us when w^e say that he is not the Tieck 
but the Musaus af this tale. Externally it is all green and living ; 
yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. 1 he 
piece does not probably cohere ; the strange chasm which yawns in 
our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the 
gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of such a 
bridge is laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes 
a mere drunken phantasmagoria, painted on ale- vapors, and the farce 
alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns should have made 
much more of this tradition ; we rather think that, for strictly poeti- 
cal purposes, not much icas to be made of it. Neither are we blind 
to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually 
accomplished : but we find far more ' ' Shakspearian " qualities, as 
these of Tarn O'Shanter have been fondly named, in many of his 
other pieces ; nay, we incline to believe that this latter might have 
been written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, 
had only possessed talent. 

Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poetical of 
all his '' poems" is one, which does not appear in Currie's Edition, 
but has been often printed before and since, under the humble title 
of The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is among the lowest in na- 
ture ; but it only the more shows our poet's gift in raising it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly com- 
pacted, melted together, refined, and poured forth in one flood of 
true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement ; yet 
sharp and precise in its details ; every fac is a portrait : that raucle 
carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal ; the 
scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag-castle of *' ' Poosie-Nan- 
sie.'' Farther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self- 
supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in a poem. The 
blanket of the night is drawTi asunder for a moment ; iii i dl, ruddy, 
and fiaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boist- 
erous revel ; for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to glad- 
ness even here ; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action 
without effort ; the next day, as the last, our Caird and our Ballad- 
monger are singing and soldiering; their "brats and callets " are 
hawking, begging, cheating ; and some other night, in new combina- 
tions, they will ring from Fate another hour of wassail and good 
cheer. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's 



LIFE OF BURXvS. 29 

ivritings ; we uiean to say only, that it seems to us the most perfect 
of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly so-called. In 
the Beggar's Opera, in the Beggar's Bash, as other critics have al- 
ready remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals 
this Cantata^ ; nothing, as we think, which comes within many de- 
grees of it. 

But by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired pieces of 
Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his Songs. It is here 
that, although through a small aperture, his light shines 'vith the 
least obstruction, in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. 
The reason may be, that Song is a brier' and simple species of com- 
position : and requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine 
poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. The Song has its rules 
equally with the Tragedy ; rules which in most cases are poorly ful- 
filled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a long 
essay on the Songs of Burns ; which we reckon by far the best that 
Britain has yet i^roduced ; for, indeed, since the era of Queen Eliza- 
beth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth atten- 
tion has been accomplished in this department. True, we have songs 
enough '' by persons of quality ;" we have tawdry, hollow, v/ine-bred, 
madrigals ; many a rhymed '' speech " in the flowing and watery vein 
of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonorous words, and, for 
moral, dashed perhaps^with some tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all 
which many persons cease not from endeavoring to sing : though for 
most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat outward, or at 
best from some region far enough short of the Soul ; not in which, 
but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some vaporous 
debatable land on the outside of the Nervous System, most of such 
madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. With the 
Songs of Burns we must not name these things. Independently of 
the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades Ms poetry, 
his songs are honest in another point of view : in form as well as in 
spirit. They do not affect to be set to music ; but they actually and 
in themselves are music ; they have received their life, and fashioned 
themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from 
the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but 
suggested ; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and co- 
herence ; but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic 
breaks, in v:arblings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. 
We consider this to be the essence of a song : and that no songs since 
the little careless catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which 
Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this 
condition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. Such 
grace and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a 
corresponding force of truth and sentiment, and inward meaning. 
The Songs of" Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than 
in the latter. AMth what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehe- 



30 LIFE OF BUKNS. 

mence and entireness ! There is a piercint^ wail in his sorro%v, the 
purest rapture in his joy : he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs 
with the loudest or slyest mirth ; and yet he is sweet and mit, " sweet 
as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear 1" 
If we farther take into account the immense variety of his subjects ; 
how, from the loud tiowing revel in Willie hrew'd \i peck d Maut, to 
the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven ; from tho 
glad kind greeting of Auld Lanrjsyne, or the comic archness of I)un- 
cctfi Gray, to the lire-eyed fury of Boots, iclia line wV Wallace hied, ho 
has found a tone and words for every mood of man's heart — it wiil 
seem a small praise if v\'e rank him as the first of all our song-writers ; 
for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that i3urns's chief influence as an 
author will ultimately be found to depend : nor, if our Fletcher'^ 
aphorism is true, shall we account th s a small influence. " Let mo 
make the songs of a people," said he, *' and you shall make its laws." 
Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself v/ith Legisla- 
tors, on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already part of tho 
m^other tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain, and of the mil- 
lions that in all the ends of the earth speak a British language. In 
hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in tl;e joy and woe of exist- 
ence, the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name and 
voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no 
British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so 
many men as this solitary and altogether private individual, with 
means apparently the humblest. 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns's 
influence may have been considerable : we mean, as exerted specially 
on the Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of Scot- 
land. Among the great changes which British, particularly Scottish 
literature, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest will 
be found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. Even 
the English writers, most popular in Burns's time, were little distin- 
guished for their Tterary patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain 
attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the 
old insular home-feeling ; literature was, as it were, without any local 
jinvironment — was not nourished by the affections which spring from 
a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in 
^acuo ; the thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not written so 
much for Englishmen as for men ; or rather, which is the inevitable 
result of this, for certain Generalizations which philosophy termed 
men. Goldsmith is an exception ; not so Johnson ; the scene of his 
Ba.mbler is little more English than that of his Rasselas. But if such 
was, in some degree, the case with England, it Avas, in the highest 
degree, the c?.se with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had, 
at that period, a very singular aspect ; unexampled, so far as we 
know, except ])erhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters ap- 



LIFE OF BURNS. 31 

pears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland became 
British, we had no literature ; at the date when Addison and Steele 
were writing their Spectators, our good Tliomas Boston was writing, 
with the noblest intent, but alike in deiiance of gramniaj' and phil- 
osophv, his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the schisms in our 
National diurch, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic : Theo- 
logic ink and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed 
to have blotted out the intellect of the country ; however, it was only 
obscured, not obliterated. Lord Karnes made nearly the first attempt, 
and a tolerably clumsy one, at writing English ; and, ere long, Hume, 
Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the 
eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our 
*•' fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indige- 
nous ; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we 
sometimes claim, and ai*e sometimes upbraided with, as a character- 
istic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of 
writers, had no Scottisii culture, nor indeed any English ; ourcultm^e 
was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and Vol- 
taire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained liimself to be a 
critic and philosopher : it w?.s the light of Montesquieu and Mably 
that guided Robertson in his political speculations : Quesnay's lamp 
that kindled the lamp of Actam Smith. Hume wa-i too rich a man to 
borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was 
acted on by them : Out neither had he aught to do with Scotland ; 
Edinburgh, equally Avith La Fleche, Avas but the lodging and labora- 
tory, in Avhich he not so much morally lived, as metai^hysically iii- 
vestigated., Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers, so clear and 
well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appearance, of any patri- 
otic affection nay, of any human affection whatever. The French 
wits of the period were as unpatriotic ; but their general deficiency in 
moral principle^ not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all 
virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We liope 
there is a patriotism founded on something better than prejudice ; 
that our country may be dear to us, without injury to our philosophy ; 
that in loving and nistly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, 
and yet love before all others, our own stern Motherland, and the 
venerable structure of social and moral Life, which Mind has through 
long ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nourish- 
ment for the better part of man's heart in all this : surely the roots, 
that have fixed themselves in tlie very core of man's being, may be so 
cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, in the field of 
his life ! Our Scottish sages have no such propensities : the field of 
their life shows neither briers nor roses ; but only a fiat, continuous 
tlirashing-fioor for Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine 
of Rent " to the "Natural History of Religion,*' are tlirashed and 
«lfted with the same mechanical impartiality ! 

\^'ith Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it cannot be 



S3 LIFE OF BURNS. 

denied tliat mucli of this evil is past, or rapidlj passing away : our 
cliief literaiy men, whatever other faults they may have, no longer 
live among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Mis- 
sionaries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and 
sympathizing in all our attachments, humors, and halDits. Our liter- 
ature no longer grows in water, but in mould, and with the true racy 
virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be 
due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to esti- 
mate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. 
But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could 
not but operate from afar ; and certainly in no heart did the love of 
country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : ** a 
tide of Scottish prejudice,'' as he modestly calls this deep and gener- 
ous feeling, *'had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it 
would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed 
to him as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would so 
gladly have done all. One small province stood open for him ; that 
of Scottish song, and how eagerly he entered on it ; how devotedly 
he labored there ! In his most toilsome journeyings, this object never 
quits him ; it is the little happy- valley of his careworn heart. In the 
gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely 
brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the 
oblivion that was covering it ! These were early feelings, and they 
abode with him to the end. 



-a wish, (I mind its power), 



A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast ; 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's Bake, 
Some usefnl plan or book could make, 
Or sinsf a sang at least. 
The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd my weedinsf-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has al- 
ready detained us too long, we cannot but think that the Life he 
willed, and was fated to lead among his fellow-men, is both more in- 
teresting and instructive than any of his written works. These 
Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in 
the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence ; and it is only . 
when intercalated in this at their proper places, that they attain their 
full measure of significance. And this too, alas, was but a fragment ! 
The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some columns, 
porticoes, firm masses of building, stand completed ; the rest more or 
less clearly indicated ; with many a far-stretching tendency, which 
only studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed 
termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, almost in the 
beginning ; andrise^ among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished 



LIFE OF BURNS. S5 

and a ruin ! If charitable judgment was necessary in estimating his 
pooms, and justice required that the aim and the manifest power to 
fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment ; much more is tills 
the case in regard to his life, the sum and result of all his endeavors, 
where his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but in mass ; 
and so much has been left unacr^cmplished, nay, was mistaken, and 
altogether marred. 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Burns, and 
that the earliest. We have not youth and manhood ; but only youth : 
for, to the end, we discern no decisive change in the complexion of 
his character ; in his thirty- seventh year, he is still, as it were, in 
youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating in- 
sight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in his 
writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding himself ; to the 
last he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such distinctness 
as is common among ordinary men ; ancl therefore ne\Tr can pui*sue 
-it with that singleness of will, which insures success ond some con- 
tentment to such men. To the last, he wavers between two pur- 
poses : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot consent 
to make this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing 
needful, through poverty or richer, through good or evil report. 
Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to him ; he must dream and 
struggle about a certain " Rock of Independence ; " which, natural 
and even admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with the 
world, on the comparatively insignificaiit ground of his being more or 
less completely supplied with money than others ; of his standing at 
a higher or at a lower altitude in general estimation, than others. 
For the world still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed col- 
ors ; he expects from it what it cannot give to any man : seeks fo^* 
contentment, not within himself, in action and wise effoit, but from 
without, in the kindness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, 
pecuniary ease. He would be happy, not activ^ely and in himself. 
iDut passively, and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not 
earned by his own labor, but showered on him by the beneficence of 
Destiny, Thus, like a young man, he cannot steady himself for any 
fixed or systematic pursuit, but swerves to and f o, between passionate 
hope and remorseful disappointment : ru^iliing onwards with a deex>, 
tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; 
travels, nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncertaiij 
guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path : and to the last, 
cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, that of clear, decided 
Activity in the sphere for which by nature and circumstances he has 
been fitted and appointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns : nay, perhaps, 
they but interest us the more in his favor. This blessing is not given 
soonest to the best ; but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are 
latest in obtaining it ; for where most is to be de'^eloix^d. mo?^t time 



a4 LIFE OF BURNS. 

may be required to develop it. A complex condition had been as- 
signed him from without, as complex a condition from within : no 
** pre-established harmony" existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel 
and the empyrean soul of Robert Bums ; it was not wonderful, there- 
fore, that the adjustment between them should have been long post- 
poned, and his arm long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast 
and discordant sn economy as he had been appointed steward over. 
Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Bums ; and through 
life, as it might have appeared, far more simply situated ; yet in him, 
too, we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral manhood ; but 
at best, and only a little before his end, the begiiming of what seemed 
such. 

By much the most striking incident in Bums's Life is his journey 
to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more important one is his residence 
at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his hfe had 
been poor and toil worn ; but otherwise not nngenial, and, with ail its 
distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, deducting out- 
ward circumstances, he had every reason to reckon himself foii;unate : 
his father was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the 
best of our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, 
what is far better and rarer, open-minded for more ; a man with a 
keen insight and devout heart ; reverent towards God, friendly there- 
fore at once, and fearless towards all that God has made ; in one 
word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully, un- 
folded Man. Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; 
and was worth descendhig far in society to seek. Unfortunately, he 
was very poor ; had he been even a little richer, almost ever so little, 
the whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a 
straw ; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world. 
Had this \Villiam Bums's small seven acres of nui*sery ground any- 
wise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to school ; had strug- 
gled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some univei'sity ; come 
forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained intellectual 
workman, and changed the whole course of British Literature — for it 
lay in him to have done this ! But the nursery did not prosper ; pov- 
erty sank' his whole family below the help of even our cheap school- 
syst<:'m : Bums remained a hard-worked ploughboy, and British liter- 
ature took its own course. Xevertheless, even in this rugged scene, 
there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his brother, 
and for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would fain shield 
from want. Wisdom is not banished from their poor hearth, nor the 
balm of natural feeling ; the solemn words. Let us icorsliip God, are 
heard there from a "priest-like father;'' if threatenings of unjust 
men throw mother and children into tears, these are tears not of grief 
only, but of holiest affection ; every heart in that humble group feels 
itself the closer knit to every other; in their hard warfare they are there 
togelher, **n little band of brethren." Neither are such teai-s, and 



LIFE OF BURNS, ^ 85 

the deep beauty tliai dwells in tliem, tlieir only portion. Light visits 
the hearts as it does the eyes of all living ; there is a force, too, in 
this youth that enables him to trample on misfortune ; nay, to bind ix 
under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor 
of character has been given him ; and so the thick- coming shapes of 
evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest 
pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambi- 
tion fail not, as he grows up ; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-col- 
ored splendor and gloom ; and the aurora light of first love is gilding 
his horizon, and the music of song is on his path ; and so he walks 

-in glory and in joy, 



Behind his plough, upon the mountain side I " 

We know, from the best evidence, that up to this date Burns was 
happy ; nay, that he was the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fasci- 
nating being to be found in the world ; more so even than he ever 
afterwards appeared. But now at this early age he quits the i^ater- 
nal roof, goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society, and be- 
comes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a certain class 
of philosophers have asserted to be a natural preparative for entering 
on active life ; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, 
necessitated to vSteep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the 
real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute 
much with this class of philosophers ; w^e hope they are mistaken ; 
for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are 
always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at 
any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet, but to yield to them ; 
and even servo for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it is not 
so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the training one receives 
in this service, but only our determining to desert from it, that fits 
for true manly x\ction. We become men, not after we have been dis- 
sipated and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure, but after we 
have ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers hem us in 
through this life ; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infi- 
nite soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world ! that a man 
must be suflftcient for himself ; and that ' * for suffering and enduring 
there is no remedy but striving and doing. "^ Manhood begins when 
we have in any way made truce with Necessity — begins, at all events, 
when w^e have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do ; 
but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled our- 
selves to Necessity, and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt 
that in Necessity we are free. Surely such lessons as this iast, 
which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal 
man, are better learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the Jooks 
and actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant. 



36 . ' LIFE OF BFKNS. 

tliaii in collision with the sharp adiiniant of Fate, attracting us to 
shipwreck us, wlien the heart is groAvn hard, and may be broken be- 
fore it will become contrite ! Had Burns continued to learn this, as 
he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he would have 
learned it fully, which he never did, and been saved many a lasting 
aberration, many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in Burns's his- 
tory, that at this time too he became involved in the religious quar- 
rels of his district ; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting 
man of the New Light Priesthood, m their highly unprofitable war- 
fare. At the tables of these free -minded clergy, he learned much 
more than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism 
awakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself ; and a whole 
world of Doubts, which it required quite another set of conjurors 
than those men to exorcise. We do not say that such an intellect as 
his could have escaped similar doubts, at some period of his history ; 
or even that he could, at a later period, have come through them al- 
together victorious and unharmed : but it seems peculiarly imfortu- 
nate that this time, above all others, should have been fixed for the 
encoimter.^ For now, with principles assailed by evil example from 
without, by *' passions raging like demons" from within, he had little 
need of skeptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the 
battle, or to cut ofl: his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses 
, his feeling of innocence ; his mind is at variance with itself ; the old 
€li\inity no longer presides there ; but wild Desires and Avild Re- 
pentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed 
himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scot- 
tish peasant, as few corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is de- 
stroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only refuge consists in trying to 
disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest 
de-speration now gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings 
of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder? fo]- now 
not only his character, but his personal liberty is to be lost ; men and 
Fortune are leagued for his hurt ; * ' hungry Ruin has him in the 
wind." He sees no escape but the saddest of all : exile from his 
loved country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent 
to him. While the ''gloomy night is gathering fast, in mental 
storm and solitude, as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell 
to Scotland : 

*' Farewell, my friends, farewell, my foes 1 
My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr I ^' 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still a false transi- 
tory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited to Edinburgh ; has- 
tens thither with anticipating heart ; is welcomed as in triumph, and 



LIFE OF BURNt^. 87 

with iiinversal blandishment and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, 
vviiatever is greatest or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on 
his face, to show him honor, sympathy, ailection. Burns's appearance 
among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded as one 
of the most singular phenomena in modern Literature ; almost like 
the appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of 
modern Politics. For it is nowise as a "mockery king," set there by 
favor, transiently, and for a j)^iiTOse, that he will let himself be 
, treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns 
his too weak head ; but he stands t -ere on his own basis ; cool, un- 
astonished, holding his equal rank from Nature her- elf ; putting forth 
no claim which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to 
vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on tiiia 
point : 

*' It needs no effort of imagination," says he, *' to conceive what the 
sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen 
or professors) must have been, in the presence of this big- boned, 
black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, 
having forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single 
stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversa- 
tion, a most thorough conviction that in the society of the most em- 
inent men of his nation, he was exactly where he was entitled to 
be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an pccasional 
sympton of being flattered by their notice ; by turns calmly meas- 
ured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his timo 
in discussion ; overpowered the hon mots of the most celebrated con- 
vivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the 
burning life of genius ; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in 
the thrice- piled tolds of social reserve, by compelling them to trem- 
ble — nay, to tremble visibly — beneath the fearless touch of natural 
pathos ; and all this without indicating the smallest willingness to bo 
ranked among those professional ministers of excitement who are 
content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what the spectators 
and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even 
if they had the power of doing it ; and last, and probably worst of 
all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies which 
they would have scorned to approach, still more frequently than 
their own, with eloquence no less magnificent ; vnXh wit in all like- 
lihood still more daring ; often enough as the superiors whom he 
fronted without alann might have guessed from the beginning, and 
had ere long, no occasion to guess, with wit, pointed at themselves." 
The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular will it 
seem to us ; details of the exterior aspect of it are already full of in- 
terest. Most readers recollect Mr. WalT^er's personal Interviews with 
Burns as among the best passages of his Narrative ; a time Avill com© 
when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it is, 
will also be precious. 



m LIFE OF BURNS. 

** As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, " I may truly say Yirg ilium 
mdi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-'?, when he first came to 
Edinburgh, hut had sense and feeling enough to he much interested 
m his poetry, and would have give the world to know him : hut 1 
had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less 
with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most fre- 
quented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 
father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings 
to dinner, hut had no opportunity to keep his word ; other^\i.se I 
might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw 
him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there 
were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom 1 remem- 
ber the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters 
sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember 
which was remarkable in Burns' s manner, was the effect produced 
upon him by a print of Bunbury's representing a soldier lying dead 
on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side — on the other, his 
widow, with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath : 

* Cold on Canadian hills, or Mtnden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain: 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The bi? drops mingling with the milk he drew 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

" Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas 
which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked 
whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remem- 
bered that they occur in a half- forgotten poem of. Langhorne's called 
by the upromising title of " The Justice of Peace." I whispered my 
information to a friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who re- 
warded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, 
I then received and still recollect with very great pleasure. 

" His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not clown- 
ish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, whi ch received part 
of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary tal- 
ents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture ; but to 
me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in per- 
spective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in 
any of the portraits. I should have take the poet, had I not known 
what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch 
school, i, €., none of your modern agriculturists who keep laborers for 
their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plougli. 
There was a strong expressi(Tn of sense and shre\\xlness in all his line- 
aments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say 
literally gloif'fd) when he spoke witli feeling or interest. T never sa\A' 



LIFE OF BURNS. -39 

Bucli another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most dis- 
tinguished men of my time. His convei^sation expressed perfect self- 
confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who 
were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed him- 
self with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forward- 
ness ; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesit-ate to express 
it firmly, yet at the same time vrith modesty. I do not remember any 
part of his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I 
ever see him again, except in the street, where he did not recognize 
me, as I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edin- 
burgh ; but (considering what literary emoluments have been since 
his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 

*'I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Barns's ac- 
quaintance with English poetry was rather limited ; and also, that 
having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, 
he talked of them with too much humility as his models ; there was 
doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

** This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, that 
his dress corresponded with his manner. He was lilte a farmer 
dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in maloum 
partem, when I say I never saw a man in company with his superi- 
ors in station or information more perfectly free from either the re- 
ality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not 
observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and 
always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which en- 
gaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of 
Gordon remark this. I do not know anything I can add to these re- 
collections of forty years since.'*' 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor ; the 
calm, unaffected, manly manner, in which he not only bore it but 
estimated its value, has justly been regarded as the best proof that 
could be given of his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little 
natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmer- 
ings of affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, wo 
could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such indication is to 
be traced here. In his unexampled situation the young peasant is 
not a moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not confuse him, 
do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that 
this winter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer 
knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford 
him ; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrangements in 
their social destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay and 
gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to play their parts ; 
nay, had himself stood in the midst of it ; and he felt more bitterly 
than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in 
that splendid game. From this time a jealous indignant fear of social 
degradation takes possession of liim ; and perverts, so far as aught 



40 LIFE OF BURNS. 

could pervert, his private contentment, and Ins feelings towards hi?? 
richer fellows. It was clear enough to Burns that he had talent 
enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have 
rightly willed this , it was clear also that he v/illed something far 
different, and therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he 
had not the power to choose the one and reject the other ; hut must 
halt forever between two opinions, two objects ; making hampered 
advancement towards either. But so is it with many men ; we * ' long 
for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price ; " and so stand 
chaffering with Fate in vexatious altercation, till the Night come, 
and our fair is over ! 

The Edinburgh learned of that period v/ere in general more noted 
for clearness of head than for warmth of heart ; with the exception 
of the good old Blacklock, whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely 
one among them seems to have looked at Burns with any true sym- 
pathy, or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. 
By the great also he is treated in the customary fashion ; entertained 
at their tables, and dismissed : certain modica of pudding and praise 
are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his 
presence ; which exchange once effected, the bargain is finished, and 
each party goes his several way. At the end of this strange season. 
Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the 
chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer ; in fame and the 
show of happiness, infinitely richer ; but in the substance of it, as 
poor as ever. Nay, poorer, for his heart is now maddened still more 
with the fever of mere worldly Ambition ; and through long years 
the disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken 
his strength for all true and nobler aims. 

What Burns was next to do or avoid, how a man so circumstanced 
was now to guide himself towards his true advantage, might at this 
point of time have been a question for the wisest ; and it was a ques- 
tion which he was left altogether to answer for himself , of his 
learned or rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a 
thought on this so trivial m tter. Without claiming for Burns the 
praise of perfect sagacity, we must say that his Excise and Farm 
scheme does not seem to us a very unreasonable one ; and that we 
should be at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. Some 
of his admirers, indeed, are scandalized at his over resolving to 
gauge, ; and Avould liave had him apparently lie still at the poo^ 
till the spirit of Patronage should stir the waters, and then heal 
with one plunge all his worldly sorrows ! We fear such counsel- 
lors knew but little of Burns ; and did not consider that happiness 
might in all cases be cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of 
golden dreams, were . ^ not that in the interim the dreamer must 
die of hunger. It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense 
of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was standing ; 
and preferred self-help on the humblest scale to dependence and in 



LIFE OF BURNS. 41 

action, tlioiigli with liope of far more splendid possibilities. But even 
these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme ; lie might expect, ii* 
it chanced that he had any friend, to rise in no long period, into 
something even like opulence and leisure ; while again, if it chanced 
that he had no friend, he could still live in security ; and for the 
rest, he '^ did not intend to borrow honor from any profession/' 
We think, then, that his plan was honest and well |_calculated ; all 
turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed ; vet not, we be- 
lieve, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no 
failure of external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. 
His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul : to his last 
day he owed no man anything. 

Meanwhile he begins well, with two good and wise actions. His 
donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose income had 
lately been seven pounds a year, was worthy of him, and n t more 
than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, was his treatment 
of the woman whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. A 
friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him : his mind 
is on the true road to peace with itself : what clearness he still 
wants will be given as he proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties, 
that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those vv'e see and have at 
hand. Had the *' patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, 
but taken nothing from him, at least nothing more ! — the wounds of 
his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have died away. 
Toil and Frugality would have been Avelcome, since Virtue dwelt 
with them, and poetry would have shown through them as of old ; 
and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own by birth-right, he 
might have looked do^vn on his earthly destiny, and all its obstruc 
tions, not with patience only, but ^^Ith love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Picturesque 
tourists,* all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, and, far 
worse, all manner of convival Maecenases, hovered round him in his 
retreat ; and his good as well as his weak qualities secured them in- 
fluence over him. He was flattered by tieir notice ; and his warm 
social nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, and hold 



* There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemm " of this class, which, 
though adopted in Carrie's Narrative, and since t en repeated in most others, we 
have all along felt an invincible disposition to regard as imaginary : "On a rock 
that projected into the stream they saw a man employed in angling, of a singnlar 
a pcarance. He hart a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose great-coat lixed 
round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword. It 
was Burns." Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the 
fox-skin cap, loose and quite Hibernian ^vatch-coat with the belt, wha* are we to 
make of this '• enormous Highland broadsword '" depending from him ? More es- 
pecially, as there is no v/ord of parish constables on the outlook to see whether, as 
Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff, or that of the public I Bums, 
ef all men, had the least tendency to seek for distinction, either in nis own eyes or 
those of others, by such poor mummeries. 



42 LIFE OF BURNS. 

on liis way apart from them: These men, as we believe, were 
proximately the means of his ruin. Not that they meant him any ill ; 
they only meant themselves a little good ; if he suffered harm, let 
Jdm look to it ! But they wasted his precious time and his precious 
talent ; they disturbed his composure, broke down his returning 
habits of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their pam- 
pering was banefnl to him ; their cruelty, which soon followed, was 
equally baneful. The old grudge against Fortune's inequality awoke 
with new bitterness in their neighborhood, and Burns had no retreat 
but to the '* Rock of Independence," which is but an air-castle, after all, 
that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from real wind 
and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately 
by contempt of othei-s and contempt of himself. Burns was no 
longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There 
was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did not 
now approve what he was doing. 

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, and 
angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with 
Poverty, nay, with Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether 
hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some 
such guide, there was no right steermg. Meteors of French Politics 
rise before him, but these were not Ms stars. An accident this, which 
hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the mad 
contentions of that time, he comes in collision with certain official 
Superiors ; is wounded 'by them ; cruelly lacerated, we should say, 
could a dead mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel : and 
shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self -seclusion, into gloomier 
moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its unity : it is a life of 
fragments ; led with little aim, beyond the melancholy one of secur- 
ing its own continuance — in fits of wild false joy, when such offered, 
and of black despondency when they passed away. His character 
before the world begins to suffer : calumny is busy with him ; for a 
miserable man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he 
has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but deep criminality is 
w^hat he stands accused of, and they that are not without sin cast the 
first stone at him ! For is he not a v/ell- wisher of the French Revo- 
lution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of all ? These 
accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were false 
enough ; but the world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his con- 
vivial Maecenases themselves were not the last to do it. There is rea- 
son to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had 
partly withdrav*'n themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, 
no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, sta- 
tioned, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost breasrvvork or 
Gentility, there to stand siege and- do battle against the intrusion of 
Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had actually seen dislionor in the society 
of Burns, and branded him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, 



LIFE OF BURNS. 43 

(^lU him ! We find one passage in this work of Mr. Lockhart^s, 
which will not out of our thoughts : 

" A gentleman of that country, whose i;ame I have already more 
than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was sel- 
dom more grieved than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer 
evening about this time to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walk- 
ing alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while 
the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and 
ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of 
whom appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted, 
and joined Burns, who, on liis proposing to cross the street, said : 
' Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ;' and quoted, after 
a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new ; 
But now helets't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts hiniseP dowie upon the cor.i-biug. 

* O were we young, as we ance hae been. 
We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea I 
A7id ivereiia my heart light I ivad die.'' 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects 
escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, 
assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner ; and, taking 
his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till 
the hour of the ball arrived. '' 

Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where bitter indig- 
nation can no longer lacerate his heart, ''^ and that most of these fair 
dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the breast- 
\vork of gentility is quite thrown down —who would not sigh over 
the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and 
make man unmerciful to his brother ? 

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would ever 
reach maturity, nor accomplish aught worthy of itself. His spirit 
was jarred in its melody ; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but 
the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. And yet 
what harmony was in him, what music even in his discords ! How 
the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the %\isest ; and all 
men felt and knew that here also was one of the Gifted ! "If he en- 
tered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news 
of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten 
minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assem- 
bled ! " Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed 
liim, in the composition of his Son^. We can understand how he 
grasped at this employment, and Jpw. too, he spurned at all other 

* Ubi fCBva indignatio cc^ vlterivslacerara neqint.—^ynTi'^ Epitaph. 



44 LIFE OF BURNS. 

reward for it but what the labor itself brought him. For the soul of 
Burns, though scathed and marred, was vet living in its full moral 
strength, though sharply cx^scious of its errors and abasement : and 
here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming 
nobleness and self devotedness left even for him to perform. He felt, 
too, that with all the '' thoughless follies" that Imd '' laid him low,'' 
the world was unjust and cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to 
another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, 
would he strive for the glory of his country ; so he cast from him the 
poor sixpence a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us not 
grudge him this last luxury of his existence ; let him not have ap- 
pealed to us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; he 
struggled through without it ; long since, these guineas would have 
been gone, and now tlie high -mindedness of refusing them will plead 
for him in all hearts for ever. 

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; for matters had 
now taken such a shape with him as could not long continue. If im- 
provement was not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited 
time maintain this dark and maddening warfare against the world 
and itself. We are not medically informed whether any continuance 
of years was, at this period, probable for Burns ; whether his death 
is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the 
natural consequence of the long series of events that had preceded. 
The latter seems to be the likelier opinion, and yet it is by no means 
a certain one. At all events, as we have said, some change could not 
be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, were 
open for Burns : clear poetical activity, madness, or death. The 
first, with longer life, was still possible, though not probable ; for 
physical causes were beginning to be concerned in it : and yet Burns 
had an iron resolution : could lie but have seen and felt that not only 
his highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for all his 
woes, lay here. The second was still less probable ; for his mind was 
ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third gate was 
opened for him : and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that 
still country where the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, 
and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided by 
any real help, uncheered by any wise s^inpathy, generous minds have 
sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that 
much might have been done for him ; that by counsel, true affection, 
and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and 
the world. We question Vv'liether there is not more tenderness of 
lieart than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It seems 
dubious to us wliethertlie richest, wisest, most benevolent individual, 
could have lent Burns any clfec^M^ help. Counsel, which seldom 
profits any one, he did not need -^m his understanding, he knew the 
right from the wrong, as wnli perhaps as any man ever did ; but th^ 



LIFE OF BURNS. 45 

persuasion wliicli would have availed liim lies not so much in the 
head as in the heart, where no argument or expostulation could have 
assisted much to implant it. As to money again, we do not really be- 
lieve that this was his essential want ; or well see how any private 
man could, even presupposing Burns's consent, have })estowed on him 
an independent fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. 
It is a mei-titying truth, that two men in any rank of society could 
hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it, as a 
necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. 
But so stands the fact : friendship, in the old heroic sense of that 
term, no longer exists, except in the cases of kindred or other legal 
affinity ; it is in reality no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue 
among men. A close observer of manners has pronounced ' ' Patron- 
age," that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be " twice 
cursed ;" cursing him that gives and him that takes ! And thus, in 
regard to outward matters also, it has become the rule, as in regard 
to inward it always was and must be the rule, that no one shall look 
for effectual help to another ; bat that each shall rest contented with 
what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle of 
modern Honor ; naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of 
Pride which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our whole 
social morality. Many a poet lias been poorer than Burns ; but no 
one was ever prouder : and we may question whether, without great 
precautions, even a pension from Royalty would not have galled and 
encumbered, more than actually assisted him. 

Still less, Therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of 
Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having 
ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have already 
stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, 
would have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We 
shall readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns ; 
that many a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom ; 
many an entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the 
powerful ; and light and heat shed on him from high places would have 
made his humble atmosphere more genial, and the softest heart then 
breathing might have lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, 
we shall grant further — and for Burns it is granting much — that with 
all his pride, he would have thanked, even with exaggerated grati- 
tude, any one who had cordially befriended him : patronage, unless 
once cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the 
poor promotion he desired in his calling might have been granted : it 
v/as his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be of ser- 
vice. All this it might have been a luxury — nay, it was a duty — for 
our nobility to have done. No part of all this, however, did any of 
■them do; or apparently attempt. ^' wis ii to do ; so much is granted 
against them. But what, then, iVthe amount of their blame? Sim- 
ply that they were men of the world, and walked by tlip principles of 



46 LIFE OF BURNS. 

such men ; that they treated Burns as other nobles and other com. 
moners liad done other poets — as the English did Shakspeare, as 
King Charles and his cavaliers did Butler, as King Pliilip and his 
grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of thorns ? or shall 
we cut down our thorns for yielding only a fence, and haws ? How, 
indeed, could the ''nobility and gentry of his native land" hold out 
any h?lp to this "Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country?" 
Were the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help them- 
selves ? Had they not their game to 2:>reserve, their borough interests 
to strengthen — dinners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give ? 
Were their means more than adequate to all this business, or less 
than adequate ? Less than adequate in general : few of them in reaL 
ity were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer, for some- 
times they had to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from 
the hard hand, and, in their need of guineas, to forget their duty of 
mercy, which Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity and for- 
give them. The game they preserved and shot, the dinners they A.te 
and gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the little Babylons 
they severally builded by the glory of their might, are all melted or 
melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man's merely selfish en- 
deavors are fated to do : and here was an action extending, in virtue 
of its worldly influence, we may say, through all time ; in virtue of 
its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of 
Goodness itself ; this action was offered them to do, and light was 
not given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But, better 
than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering did not end 
with the life of Burns ; neither was the solemn mandate, " Love one 
another, bear one another's burdens." given to the rich only, but to 
all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, t') assuage by our 
aid or our pity : but celestial nature^, groaning under the fardels of 
a weary life, we shall still find ; and that wretchedness which Fate 
has rendered voiceless and tuneless is not the least wretched, but the 
most. 

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure lies chiefly 
with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him with more, 
rather than with less, kindness than it usually shows to such men. 
It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers ; hunger 
and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison- 
chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the market-place it 
has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those 
who have come to enlighten and pyirify it. Homer and Socrates and 
the Christian Apostles belong to old days ; but the world's Martyr- 
ology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo lan- 
guish in priestly dungeons, Tavsso pines in the cell of a mad-house, 
Camoens dies begging on the stre^ of Lisbon. So neglected, so 
" persecuted they the Prophets," nortn Judea only, but in all places 
where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order 



LIFE OF BURNS. 47 

is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age ; that he has no 
right therefore to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound 
to do it great kindness ; tliat Burns, in particular, experienced fully 
the usual proportion of the world's goodness ; and that the blame of 
his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 

Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer : With him- 
self ; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to 
the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise ; seldom is a life morally 
wrecked but the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, 
some want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature 
fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful 
for its action and duration ; least of all does she so neglect her mas- 
terpiece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it 
is in the power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the 
mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much 
as to affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total 
of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; nothing more can lie in the cup 
of human woe : yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over 
Death, and led it captive, converting its physical \'ictory into a moral 
victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all 
that their past life had achieved. What has been done may be done 
again ; nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism 
that differs in different seasons ; for without some portion of this 
spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Seli- 
denial, in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever 
attained to be good. 

We have already stated the error of Burns, and mourned over it 
rather than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, of 
consistency in his aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly 
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which 
is of a far dift'erent and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was 
nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing ; no man formed as he 
was can be an}i;hing by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot- 
blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateury but of a 
true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had 
been given him : and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, 
but of skepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true Nobleness 
was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, 
altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences 
of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his 
highly untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for 
him to repel or resist ; the better spirit that was within him ever 
sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy ; he spent his life in en- 
deavoring to reconcile these two, and lost it, as he must have lost it, 
without reconciling them here. 

Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue poor, for he would 
cot endeavor to be otherwise ; this it had been well could he have 



48 LIFE OF BURNS. 

once for all admitted and considered as finally settled. He was poor, 
irulv ; but hundreds even of liis own class and order of minds have 
been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it : nav, his own 
father had a far sorer battle wdth ungrateful destiny than his w^as ; 
and he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all 
moral intents prevailmg, against it. True, Burns had little means, 
had even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; 
but so much the more precious was what little he had. In all these 
external respects his case was hard, but very far from the hardest. 
Poverty, incessant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been 
the lot of poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to con- 
quer. Locke was lanished as a traitor, and wrote his Essay on tlie 
Human Understanding sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was 
Milton rich, or at his ease, when he composed Paradise LoUl Not 
only low, but fallen from a height ; not only poor, but impoverished ; 
in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immor- 
tal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes 
finish his work a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, was not tlie 
Aravcana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without 
even the aid of ])aper — on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and 
voyager snatched any moment from that wild w^arfare ? 

And what then had these men which Burns ^vanted ? Tw^o things, 
both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They 
had a true, religious principle of morals ; and a single not a double 
aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-w^orship- 
pers ; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self. 
Not personal enjoyment was their object ; but a high, heroic idea of 
Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other 
form, ever hovered before them ; in which cause, they neither shrunk 
from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as something won- 
derful ; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so to 
spend and be spent. Thus the '' golden calf of Self-love,'' however 
curiously carved, was not their Deity ; but the Invisible Goodness, 
which alone is man's reasonable service. This feeling was as a celes- 
tial fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all the 
provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, they 
willed one thing, to which all other things were subordinated and 
made subservient : and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge 
will rend rocks ; but its edge must be sharp and single ; if it be dou- 
ble, the wedge is bruised in pieces and Avill rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; in wiiich 
heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at least not yet dis- 
believed in ; but much of it likewise they owed to themselves. With 
Burns again it was different. His morality, in most of its practical 
points, is that of a mere ^vorldly man ; enjoyment, in a finer or a 
coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. A noble in- 
stinct sometimes raises him above this ; but an instinct only, and act- 



LIFE OF BURNS. 49 

ing only for moments. He has no Religion ; in the shallow age, 
wiiere his days were cast, Religion Avas not discriminated from the 
New and Old Light forms of Religion ; and was, witli these, becom- 
ing obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a 
trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. 
He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at 
best, is an anxious wish ; like that of Rabelais, ''a great Perhaps." 

He Toved Poetry w^armly, and in his heart ; could he but have loved 
it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well. For 
Poetry, as Burns could have follow^ed it, is but another form of Wis- 
dom, of Religion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was 
denied him. His poetry is a stray, vagrant gleam, which will not be 
extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, 
but is often a Avildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary foi 
Burns to be rich, to be or to seem ** independent ; " but it icas neces- 
sary for him to be at one with his own heart ; to place what was 
highest in his nature, highest also in his life ; *' to seek within him- 
self for that consistency and sequence which external events would 
for ever refuse him." He was born a poet ; poetry was the celestial 
element of his being, and should have been the soul of his whole en- 
deavors. Lifted into that serene etlier, whither he had wings given 
liim to mount, he would have needed no other elevation : Poverty, 
neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, 
were a small matter to him : the pride and the passions of the v/orld 
lay far beneath his feet ; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, 
on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear 
recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, 
we question whether for his culture as a Poet, poverty, and much suf- 
fering for a season, were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in 
looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. '' I would 
not for much," says Jean Paul, '' that I had been born richer." And 
yet Paul's birth was poor enough ; for in another place he adds : 
*' The prisoner's allowance is bread and water ; and I had often only 
the latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes 
out the purest ; or, as he has himself expressed it, ''the canary bird 
sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage." 

A man hke Burns might have divided his hours between poetry 
and virtuous industry ; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay, 
prescribes, and wiiich has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp 
of thrones ; but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's 
banquets, was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he 
be at ease at such banquets ? What had he to do there, mingling his 
music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices, and brighten- 
ing the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven ? 
Was it his aim to enjoy life ? To-morrow he must go drudge as an 
Ii^xciseman ! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, 
and at times an offender against certain rules of society ; but rather 



50 LIFE OF BLTRNS. 

that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run a-rauck against them all. 
How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever 
know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, 
under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us 
with astonishment at the natural strength and W'Orth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this j)erverseness : but not in' 
others, only in himself ; least of all in simple increase of wealth and 
worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard -enough 
about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. 
Nay, have w^e not seen another instance of it in these very days ? 
Byron, a man of endowment considerably less ethereal than that of 
Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an 
English peer : the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, 
are his by inheritance : the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in 
another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail 
him ? Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has a poet's 
soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; and soon feels 
that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars ! Like 
Burns, he is only a proud man ; might like him have '' purchased a 
pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan ; " for Satan 
also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry and the model 
apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case, too, the celestial ele- 
ment will not mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of 
the world he must not be ; vulgar Ambition wdll not live kindly with 
poetic Adoration ; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like 
Burns, is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His 
life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, 
central fire, w^arming into beauty the products of a world ; but it is 
the mad fire of a volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of 
a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their genera- 
tion, to teach it a higher doctrine, a purer truth : they had a message 
to deliver, which left them no rest till it was accomplished ; in dim 
throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them ; for 
they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipa- 
tion, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. They are 
in the «amp of the Unconverted. Yet not as high messengers of rigor- 
ous though benignant truth, but as soft fiattering singers, and in 
pleasant fellowship, will they live there ; they are first adulated, then 
persecuted ; they accomplish little for others ; they find no peace for 
themselves, but only death and the peace of the grave. We confess, 
it is not without a certain mournful aw^e that we view the f a^e of these 
noble souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all 
their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece 
of history — ticice told us in our own time ! Surely to men of l:ke 
genius, if tliere be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impres- 
sive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for 



LIFE OF BURNS. 51 

the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to 
consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he at- 
tempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were 
never trurer than in this : ' * He who would write heroic poems 
must make his whole life a heroic poem." 

If he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from this 
arena ; for neither its lofty glories nor its fearful perils are for him. 
L^t him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; let him worship and 
be-sing the idols of the time, and the time vnll not fail to reward 
him — if, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and 
Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts 
consumed them ; and bettei* it was for them that they could not. 
For it is not in the favor of the great or of the small, but in a life of 
truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's 
or a Burns's strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, 
or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth 
with favor and furtherance for literature, lilve the costliest flower- 
jar enclosing the lovliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mis- 
taken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flat- 
tery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional ver- 
ses, their purveyor of table- wit ; he cannot be their menial, he cannot 
even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such 
union be attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the 
harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is 
through the heavens, bringing light to all lands ; will he lumber on 
mud highways, dragging aie for earthly appetites, from door to door *? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead 
us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the public 
moral character of Burns ; but this also we must forbear. We are 
far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than 
the average ; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten 
thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where ihePleb- 
iscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to 
us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But 
the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men ; unjust 
on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance : 
it decides, lilve a court of law, by dead statutes ; and not positively 
but negatively ; less on wliat is done right than on what is or is not 
done wrong. Nwt the few inches of reflection from the mathematical 
( rbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the 
whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a 
planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system ; or it may be a 
city hippodrome ; nay, the circle of the ginhorse, its diameter a score 
of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured ; and 
it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhors© and that of the planet 
will yield the same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the 
root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rous- 



53 LiFE OF BURNS. 

seaus, wliicli one never listens to witli approval. Granted, the sMp 
comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged ; and the pilot is 
therefore blameworthy ; for he has not been all-wise and all-power- 
ful ; but to know Jioid blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage 
has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dog's. 
With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, 
we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he 
lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that 
one of marble ; neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away 
from the memory of man. While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll 
on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets 
of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little 
Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye : for this also is of Nature's 
own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the 
earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day ; and often 
will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and mu»e 
among its rocks and pines ! 



THOQ END. 



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Poets,— Guariiii. T. A. Trollope. 
Homes and Haunts of the Italian 

Poets,— 'Jasso. Frances E. Troilope. 
Charles Lamb. Algernon Biaok. 
On a Radical Reform in the Method 

of Teaching the Classical Languages. 

John Stuart Blackie 
Some Gossip About Leicester Square. 
Manzoni's Hymn fur Whitsunday. 

Dean Stanley. 
The Musical Cultus of the Present 

Day. H. Heathcote Statham. 
On being Knocked Down and Picked 

Up Again A Consolatory Essay. 
On the Choice of Books. Frederic 

Harrison. 
On the Study of Natural History. St. 

George Mivart. 
The Philological Society's Dictionary. 

The Academy. 
The Phcenicians in Greece. Sayce. 
Plain Words About the Afghan Que.s- 

tion. Archibald Forbes. 
Probability as the Guide of Conduct. 

W. E. Gladstone. 
Recollections of Thackeray. 
The Royal Wedding. H. C. Merivale. 
The Schoolship Shaftesbury. Ewart. 
Schopenhauer on Men, Books and 

Music. Frafier'fi Maciazht.e, 
Supposed Changes in the Moon. Rich- 
ard A. Proctor. 
Sydney Dobell. Robert Buchanan. 
Theatrical Makeshifts and Blunders. 

H. Barton Baker. 
Their Appointed Seasons. J. G. Wood. 
Through the Ages : A Legend of a 

Stone Axe. Veia Quorterly Marjazine. 
Toilers in Field and Factory. Time, 
About the Transvaal. Cfiamherd^ Jour- 
nal. 
Two Modern Japanese Stories. 
The Vaquero. Frank Desprez. 
A Visit to the New Zealand Geysers. 

Clement Bunbury. 
Wagner as a Dramatist. Ed. Rose. 
Winter Morn in Country— Winier Morn 

in Town. Alex. H. Japp. 
A Woman's Love. A Slavonian Studj". 

Adrian de Velvedere. 



THE LIBRARY MAGAZINE. 

CONTENTS OF VOL. II. 

Price, bound in cloth, 50 cents ; half Russia, gilt top, 75 cents ; postage 9 cents. 



The Ape of Dacte in the Florentine 
Chronicles, E. M. Clarke. 

The Ancient British Church. London 
QiiAirterh/ Review, 

The Artistic Dualism of the Renais- 
sance. Vernon Lee. 

Papiisra. Dean Stanley. 

Beasts, Birds and Insects in Irish 
Folk- Lore. Letitia McClintock. 

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hughes. 

Wiliiara Black. Univei^aiiy 3Iagazine. 

The Blackbird. Sidney Grey. 

Mr. John Blackwood. Athenceum. 

Cinderella. W. K. S. Ralston. 

The Classical Controversy; Its Pre- 
sent Aspect. Alexander Bnin. 

Clerical Education in France. Ed- 
mond About. 

Comedie Fran9aise, Francisque Sar- 
cey. 

The Demise of the Kalserbund. 

In Denmark. Augustus J. C. Hare. 

A Dialogue on Human Happiness. 
W. H. -Mallock. 

A Double Memorial cf Newstead Ab- 
bey. W. G. Blackie. 

Down Among the Dutchmen. Henry 
Van Laun. 

Dragon Flies. J. G. "Wood. 

Drunkenness in England. John B. 
Gough. 

Dulce est Desipere. J. A. Symonds. 

The EgiTs Saga. E. W. G. 

Etna. Richard A. Proctor. 

First and Last. A. K. 

The French Play in London. Mat- 
thew Arnold 

The Future of China. Walter H. Med- 
hurst. 

Generic Ideas. Francis Galton. 

Hans Sachs and the Mastersong. M. 
W. M. C. 

Haunted. G. B. Stuart. 

Hirlden Treasure: Torlonia Museum. 
Blackwood's Magazine. \ 

History and Politics. J. R. Seeley. j 

Odes of Horace, I., 15. The Gentle- \ 
tnan's Magazine. j 

A Hungarian Episode. Zigsuner Music. 
Fraser's Magazine. | 



I<'n. Blackuood's 3fagaHvf. 

Joseph de Maistre on Russia. Quarter- 
ly Jx'evieic. 

The Lark. Mortimer Collins. 

The Last Jewish Revolt. Ernest Re- 
nan. 

A Mathematician's View of the Theory 
of Evolution. W. H. L. Russell. 

Meteor Dust. Richard A. Proctor. 

'i he Milky Way. Claude Templar. 

Model Men and Women. 

Music and Musicians. Quarterly Re- 
vieio. 

The National Poetry of Servia. Kate 
Freiligrath-Kroeker. 

A New Vocation for Women. J. Ches- 
ney. 

In Norway. Augustus J. C. Hare. 

Notes from Cyprus . Blackivood'' s Maga- 
zine. 

On Freedom. F. Max. Muller. 

Our Nameless Benefactors. J. G. 
Wood. 

Our New Wheat Fields in the North- 
west. T T.Vernon Smith. 

Parliamentary Government in Ameri- 
ca. Horace White. 

Pascal and His Editors. Quarterly Re- 
rieio. 

Prince Napoleon. Justin McCarthy. 

The Prize French Novel. Mack-wood's 
Magazine. 

The Problem of the Great Pyramid. 
Richard A. Proctor. 

A Serm.on in Stone. Austin Dobson. 

Studies in Biography. Fra&er's Maga- 
sine. 

The Supreme God in the Indo-Euro- 
pean Mythology. James Darmes- 
teter. 

The Surgeon and the Mogul's Daughter, 
Clinonhers^ Journal. 

In Sweden. Augustus J. C. Hare. 

To Garibaldi. John Stuart Blackie. 

The Unity of Nature: A Speculation. 
Lord Bishop of Carlisle. 

What is Religion ? Joseph P. Thomp- 
son, 



THE LIBRARY MAGAZINE. 

CONTKNTS OF VOL. III. 

Price, bound in cloth, 60 cents : half Russia, gilt toiD, 85 cents ; postage 9 cents. 



Animal Intelligence. Westminster He- 
vie ic. ■ 

Recent Events in Arabia. W. S. 
Biunt. 

Where are we in Art. Lady F. P. 
Verney. 

Atheism and the Rights of Man. "W. 
H. Mallock. 

On the Utility of their Beauty to 
Flowers. Edward Fry. 

Beethoven, H.H. Statham. 

The Bells of Lynn. Fred. E.Wetherly. 

Rejected MSS, Belgixivia 

The Late John Blackwood. Black- 
wood's Magazine. 

The Functions of the Brain. Julius 
Althaus. 

Buddha's First Sermon. T. W. Rhys 
Davids. 

Burns and Beranger, Charles Mackay. 

Cervantes' Voyage to Parnassus. 
James Mew. 

The Manliness of Christ. Thomas 
Hughes. 

The Cid. William E. A. Axon. 

The Philosophy of Color. Edinlnir^gh 
Review. 

Colorado. J. W. Barclay. 

Copyright. Matthew Arnold. 

The Character and Writings of Cyrus 
the Great. Gpo. Rawlinson. 

Daltonism. William Pole. 

The Perfect Death. Macmillan's Maga- 
zine. 

The Deep Sea and its Contents. Wil- 
liam B. Carpenter. 

John Thadeus Delane. Macjnilla7i's 
Magazine. 

The Philosophy of Drawing Rooms. 
Cornhill Magazine. 

Herbert Spencer on the Dataof Ethics. 
H. Calderwood. 

The New Fiction. Henry Holbeach. 

Benjamin Franklin. Edinhurgh Re- 
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Free Trade, Railways and the Growth 
of Commerce W. E. Gladstone. 

Old Fashioned Gardening. Margaret 

A. Paul, 
the Pyramids of Ghizeh. Richard A. 
Proctor. 

An Antiquary's Ghost Story. Augus- 
tus Jessopp. 

The Russian Gipsies. Charles G. Le- 
land. 

Goethe's *'Farbenlohre." John Tyn- 
dall. 



The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture. 

Walter H. Pater. 
Hagen's Death Song. Kate Freiligrath- 

Kroeker. 
Handel. H. H, Statham. 
Health at Home. B. W. Richardson. 
Irish Needs and Irish Remedies. H. 

H. Hyndman. 
The Homes and Haunts of the Italian 

Poets. Alfieri. Frances Eleanor 

Trollope. 
Justinian. Robert Buchanan. 
Landlords and Land Law.*^. John 

Stuart Blackie. 
The Light of Asia. Edwin Arnold. 
The Literary Calling and its Future. 

James Payn. 
The Lord's Prayer and the Church. 

John Ruskin. 
Marcus Aurelius. Ernest'Renan. 
The Story of the Merchant of Venice 

James Spedding. 
A Conservatoire of Music for England. 

Charles Sumner Maine. 
A Sleepless Night. Alfred Austin. • 
The Outlook in Europe. Contemporary 

Revieiv. 
Paganism in Paris. Hyacinthe Loy- 

son. 
Personal Property, Debt and Interest. 

F. W. Newman. 
Phaedra and Phcedre. Lionel Tenny- 
son. 
The Pinch of Poverty. James Payn. 
Prayer Among all Nations. Cunning- 
ham Geikie. 
The Reign of Queen Anne. Black- 
wood's Magazine. 
Radiant Matter. D. Pidgeon. 
Ernest Renan. George Saintsbury. 
Russian Nihilism. Fitz Cunliffe-Owen. 
Seeking Rest. J. Ashcroft Noble. 
Sensational Science. George R. Sims. 
Shakspere's Fools. J. Newby Hether- 

ington. 
Sham Admiration in Literature. 

James Payn. 
Middle Class Domestic Life in Spain. 

Hugh James Rose. 
Usury. John Ruskin. 
Variations in the Roman Church. 

Dean Stanley. 
What is a Bank ? Bonaray Price. 
What is Jupiter Doing ? Henry J. 

Slack. 
What is Rent ? Bon amy Price. 



Ij I B JEv> .A- -E\> JL 



UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE; 



A. REPRINT ENTIRE OF THE LAST (1879) EDINBURGH AND LONDON EDITIOSt 
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